


correspondence

by macneiceisms



Category: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, M/M, Original Cardassian Characters - Freeform, Post-Canon Cardassia, Unsent letters, past Julian Bashir/Ezri Dax - Freeform
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-10-12
Updated: 2020-12-16
Packaged: 2021-03-08 01:01:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 26,446
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26977021
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/macneiceisms/pseuds/macneiceisms
Summary: Three years after the end of the Dominion war, Dr. Julian Bashir goes missing.
Relationships: Julian Bashir/Elim Garak
Comments: 85
Kudos: 91





	1. letters

**Author's Note:**

> This fic takes the events of [Cruel are the Times](https://archiveofourown.org/works/16632212/chapters/38991917) and [The Viewless Winds](https://archiveofourown.org/works/15211109/chapters/35279480) by StoplightDelight as canon, which are both incredible. They aren't necessary to read to understand this fic.

> cor·re·spond·ence _  
> /ˌkôrəˈspändəns,ˌkärəˈspändəns/  
> _ noun _  
> 1\. a close similarity, connection, or equivalence.  
>  2.communication by exchanging letters with someone._

* * *

_Stardate 52881.4_

~~ Garak, ~~

~~ I hope you’re enjoying your return to Cardassia.  ~~

~~ Garak, ~~

~~ I hope your journey to Cardassia was a safe one. By now, you have no doubt seen the damage.  ~~

~~ Garak, ~~

~~800 million of your people have died and I can’t find a thing to say to you.~~

_Stardate 52900.8_

Garak —

I packed up your quarters today. That is to say, I found the chocolates you left in the panel above the replicator. I don’t know what came over me.

I’m sorry, I ate them.

— Dr. Julian Bashir

[unsent]

_Stardate 52960.8_

Garak —

I heard from the spotty transmissions we get from Cardassia that you’ve settled in Paldar. There’s a Federation aid team going to the field hospital in a week. I’m due back on Teplan around then, but there’s another team to rotate them out in a few months. Ezri has started talking about switching to command and if she heads back to Trill for more training, I could volunteer for the posting. That is, if you’d have me. I mean, it would be work. It wouldn’t be like old times in the replimat. Maybe you don’t even take lunch if there’s a daily ration, and maybe I’d be stationed too far away. I guess you don’t have time for literature when you’re rebuilding Cardassia.

If you don’t want me there, feel free to send this right into the trash.

— Dr. Julian Bashir

[unsent]

_Stardate 53346.3_

Garak —

I tried writing a letter out a couple months ago but everything I wrote was appalling. Just absolute rubbish. I was thinking about joining a Federation aid team but now it looks like the teams are pulling out. I was thinking about trying NERV-C but I don’t quite have the leave saved after I went back to Teplan to collect more data on the vaccine effectiveness. I don’t know what to do. I don’t feel confident in how aid disbursement is going, but of course I can’t do anything about it. I still can’t find an effective antiviral no matter the hours or days or weeks. I guess its been months now. Can’t remember the last time I slept through the night.

But you don’t want to hear any of that. I can’t provide any comfort for you as you toil when I’m in such a state. I hope you’re still in Paldar and I can still get this letter routed to you. I’d still like to come to Cardassia, maybe when Ezri settles on her decision. She’s in a real crisis over her future and I’m trying to be there for her. I’m sorry I wasn’t there for you more when you were on the station.

I miss you dearly and the circumstances of your return are hardly ideal, but I know you love Cardassia. I am happy you can sit under her sun and feel her soil under your feet. Something sweet amongst the bitterness. I’d like to see you again, if you ever have the time.

— Dr. Julian Bashir

[unsent]

_Stardate 53728.7_

Garak,

Morn got married. I shall do doubt die alone at this rate. ~~Not like me and Ezri would ever.~~ The station is quieter without him.

[unsent]

_Stardate 54002.9_

Garak,

Ambassador Troi came back for a whole week for the Gratitude Festival (no viruses, thank god) and tried to set Colonel Kira up with a lovely Romulan senator. Unfortunately, they were already in the early stages of a relationship and the Ambassador unfortunately drove the lovely woman straight back to Romulus.

I think about Major Kalenna a lot, with the permanent stream of her countrymen and women coming through. I find them all a little less delightful than her, but she endeared me greatly to them nonetheless. I thought Cardassians drank a lot, but our gray friends routinely drink me right under the table.

I still think kanar is better than Romulan ale, but I can’t bear either these days. Gin and tonics for me. Though, I must confess, I have dreamed for another taste of _civit._

Yours,

Dr. Julian Bashir

[unsent]

_Stardate 54438.6_

Garak,

Ezri left me. I’m relieved, but with her I could pretend I wasn’t lonely, and now there’s no pretense. I never believed Jabara’s superstitions before, but now I hear the ghosts on the station.

Another set of voices to haunt me.

Do you understand? Do you feel surrounded by ghosts too?

Yours,

Julian

[unsent]

_Stardate 54602.8_

Garak,

I don’t remember which night it was. Was it night? Time was strange on that journey to Starbase 375. We drank tea after a long shift. We talked about nothing. You’d removed your jacket since the fire damage the ship took made it warm enough. You looked so beautiful. I remember feeling at peace. I remember thinking that if all I had was nothing but the simplest, dullest existence the universe could conjure up for me, I would be happy to spend it as such with you. I remember realizing that all that time, I’d loved you. I still do.

Your dear doctor,

Julian Bashir

[unsent]

_Stardate 54971.5_

Garak,

Do you know any good old Order remedies for nightmares? I’m starting to annoy the neighbors.

Yours,

Julian Bashir

[unsent]

_Stardate 55021.1_

~~To my dear Garak ,~~

~~Elim ,~~

Garak,

I don’t know how many letters to you I’ve started and never sent over the last few years. I never know how to start. I’ll write something idiotic, patch it up, only to find it limping or bleeding again and having to be written anew. It cannot be helped; the man writing this is just as raw and twisted as the words that come out of him. What is my apology for poetry?

Ezri is long gone and we are long over. She left before I took a month’s sabbatical on Teplan. Kira and I are the only ones left. We have breakfast each morning. She taught me to play springball and it’s a proper challenge. She’s a good friend. But loneliness gnaws at me all the same. Your shop is a storage space. Quark still wants to open a massage parlor, but I can’t bear the thought of seeing it replaced. Like it was never there. Like you were never here.

I see you everywhere. I take lunch in my office because some days the thought of seeing our old table occupied by someone else — or god forbid, by me, with your seat empty across me — nearly buckles me. The mention of your name in passing conversation can do the same thing. Your chair is so damn empty.

You carved out a part of me and took it with you when you went home. Did you take the best part of me? Did you take the part of Julian Bashir that I liked? The part that could live with itself? Is that why I feel like an open wound? Do you think about me? Am I arrogant to think our conversations provide the same comfort and torment in quiet moments to you as they do to me? Or am I just a man who let our friendship rot? A smug, sanctimonious Federation doctor, better left forgotten while you go on and do honest work? I hope not. God, I hope not.

I think of you. All the time. I wonder what the Cardassian sun feels like. I wonder if you’ve grown too thin from rations. I wonder where you sleep and if your hands are hard and calloused. I wonder what company you keep. I wonder how heavy you find the rubble. How often you go to sleep hungry. If you have any use for poetry. I wonder what your hair looks like now. I wonder what clothes you wear.

I suppose it’s too much to hope for an invitation to join you or to visit. To want such a thing feels glaringly rude while you work on the Reunion Project and holding the Cardassian democracy together. I don’t know how to bridge this chasm I made. I don’t know how to move forward while I’m clutching the moment I let you go. I don’t know if I could bear your silence. I don’t know if I could bear your forgiveness. I certainly don’t deserve to ask for it.

I was afraid. I was afraid my friendship with you would jeopardize my tenuous allowance to keep my commission and my medical license. I was afraid that if anyone knew the depth of my affection for you they’d use you. And with your position as precipitous as mine, I knew I could only be a liability. I didn’t want to be your weakness. I didn’t want you to be mine either. I hated every second of it. I betrayed myself for you. Because I know love cannot be a weakness. Because I know the depth of my feeling for you has only ever given me strength.

You have always given me strength. Now, before, a decade ago. I kept the option of exile an open possibility for all my life. Too many slip-ups, the past barreling back to me, being exposed by someone who learned my secret. Did you know he knew my secret? Did you know I sat in that barrack in silence sure that he would pass on his promise to destroy me? Part of me wanted him to. Part of me wanted to be pried free. I waited with bated breath for my greatest secret to be torn open, and behold, I received yours instead. We both told a lie with our lives. We were more like each other than we imagined. I watched you, knowing you knew what I needed to learn when the inevitable came.

I’ve received transfer options. Starships. Exploratory missions. Planetside research stations. Nothing _too_ prestigious or prominent, but well under Starfleet’s thumb. I can’t bring myself to take them. At least here I can see Cardassia’s star, and think of you in her light. At least here I can try to put myself back together, raw and battered as I am. I don’t know how yet. I don’t know what I need. I don’t know what you need. I regret all the convoluted ways I wounded you, unable to see what was in my own heart. I cannot change that man. Maybe one day I can be a man who finds his way to your doorstep, worthy of your forgiveness. Maybe one day I can be a man who is unafraid. Who can stay. Who can love you in the light of the sun and not just in the dark, hidden corners of his heart.

When I think of you on Cardassia, I always imagine you in a garden. The shred of hope left in me dreams of a future where I can sit amongst your orchids and watch you under the resplendent sun.

Yours in whatever way you’ll have me,

Julian Bashir

[sent]

_// transmission intercepted //_

A man in black reads, smiles, and files the transmission away.

_Stardate 55621.1_

Garak —

In all our time, you have never subjected me to such cruelty. Six months of silence is answer enough. I suppose this life was not meant for us. You have left me with nothing more to say than goodbye, my friend.

Dr. Julian Bashir

[unsent]


	2. a deep no sound

> Vowels ploughed into other: opened ground.
> 
> The mildest February for twenty years
> 
> Is mist bands over furrows, a deep no sound
> 
> Vulnerable to distant gargling tractors.
> 
> Our road is steaming, the turned-up acres breathe.
> 
> Now the good life could be to cross a field
> 
> And art a paradigm of earth new from the lathe
> 
> Of ploughs. My lea is deeply tilled.
> 
> Old ploughsocks gorge the subsoil of each sense
> 
> And I am quickened with a redolence
> 
> Of farmland as a dark unblown rose.
> 
> Wait then...Breasting the mist, in sowers’ aprons,
> 
> My ghosts come striding into their spring stations.
> 
> The dream grain whirls like freakish Easter snows.
> 
> _— Glanmore Sonnets I, Seamus Heaney_

—

Julian washes blood from his hands under the sonic shower. The light above flickers and he gives the shower wall a few smacks with his palm. The light steadies. He returns to scrubbing his hands and when they’re clean, he washes his face, only a little itchy from his beard. Dirt and sweat slough off his body, but the vibrations can’t take the exhaustion away.

Three deaths tonight. Two elderly women; one a grandmother whose four sons had perished in the Dominion bombardment of the Capitol City, the other a lonely engineer who’d been working on the solar power array in Indar since before the occupation of Bajor. His third patient lost tonight was a man — a boy — spared dying in the war by virtue of his youth only to succumb to an unchecked viral infection.

Winter on the Northern Continent is nothing if not brutal.

Clean, Julian dresses in his civilian clothes: trousers, a wool shirt, and his old Starfleet uniform jacket, all faded a gray-brown after running them through the sonic cleaning chamber every day. Once he zips his jacket up, he runs his medical uniform, just as faded, through the cleaning cycle. It stays stubbornly stained but at least it doesn’t smell like the night shift. The little drawer set in the wall of the staff fresher does wonders for dust, and little for blood. He puts his medical uniform back into his little locker, seals it with a fingerprint, and pulls on his dust-caked boots.

Datapadd and bag in hand, he slips out of the fresher, dodging the few nurses and doctors in the staff room eating their breakfast rations or drinking tea. Nurse Setek, a brusque but willowy young man on the morning shift, dips his chin to Julian across the room. His cup and plate are both empty. Julian waves back in apology for missing the meal, nearly dropping his datapadd, before skittering across the cramped hallway in the records office. He transfers the signed death certificates to the central terminal, careful to route it in the way Doctor Nekot likes.

The terminal beeps three times. Three more bodies for burial, and three chimes from the computer. He doesn’t know if its a blessing or a curse that every entry feels like it should be the end of the world. Even with a head for numbers and counting, he’s lost track of how many death certificates he’s given Nurse Damec to sign in the last seven months. How many of them he’s filed.

“Going home, Doctor Baa’chir?” says Doctor Nekot, stepping into the records office.

“Yes,” he says, bowing slightly in deference. “It was a long night.”

She pulls a datapadd out of her coat pocket, and fixes a loose strand of steel-gray hair behind her ear.

“It’s winter, the night is always long. How many dead?” she asks, frowning at her while she clicks through tabs of spreadsheets and graphs stuffed full of epidemiological data.

“Three,” sighs Julian, putting his own datapadd back into the solar charger. “The other twelve in the quarantine section have stabilized. I trust you had a more restful night than mine.”

“I slept,” she huffs. “Between this new bout of flu and the pneumonia from the dust storms, I hardly know what we’ll do.”

“We’ll take what we can get. Any update on the antivirals?”

“Same thing. Delayed, no news of an update,” she says, her nostrils flaring.

Julian closes his eyes and sighs.

“What’s their excuse this time? Industrial replicators needed for councilman houses again?”

Nekot hisses.

“I would happily use my last credits to send you off to Coranum. If _anyone_ can get the council to prioritize medical aid to Indar simply by being a _bloody nuisance_ it would be you.”

For the first time in days, against the heavy shroud of exhausted torpor and red-gray dust, Julian feels a smile creeping up. Nekot, steel-haired and severe, glares at him.

“That might be the _nicest_ thing you ever said to me,” says Julian.

She rolls her eyes.

“If you were my son...”

“I know, I know,” says Julian, throwing his hands up. “But none of us are leaving Indar anytime soon.”

She beckons him to walk with her. Her coat, its director’s patch on the breast, swishes against her calves.

“I may not be leaving the continent but I’ll be heading to the central hospital in Indar’or at the end of the octal.”

“Oh?”

“If you’re going to inquire,” she barks. “You should ask a real question.”

Julian flushes. “Wh—why are you going?”

Years of exposure to a certain type of Cardassian — two kinds, really, but in their effusiveness and manner of veiled suggestion alike — failed to prepare him for the direct nature of more common Cardassians. Nekot, Indari born and bred, a herder’s daughter from the highlands, stamped a decade of habitual obfuscation out of Julian in less than a week.

_‘There are no double meanings in medicine,’_ he remembers. ‘ _I will not second-guess your words. You say what you mean and you say it in as few words as possible.’_

He indulges in convoluted conversation now with Doctor Enar when their research rotations overlap, far from Nekot’s supervision. Enar is something of intelligentsia heritage. A southerner. A city-dweller. Nekot can’t stand her.

While Nekot fails to suffer from Garak’s lying vice, she suffers his habit of scathing remarks. And none suffer more than the Cardasssi’or-born Doctor Enar. Nekot often slides snide comments about the other doctor being useless without a host of modern osteotractors, hyposprays and laser scalpels. ‘Wouldn’t know a stethoscope from a scalpel and would let a riding hound bleed to death even if she had a _kressa_ leaf, needle, and knife,’ Nekot has muttered on more than one occasion, thinking herself out of Julian’s earshot in the choked noise of a bustling emergency tent, their generators blackened out from a rabid dust storm.

He sees less of the conflict on the night shift, but Setek fills him on any missed arguments, while Julian trades him his thoughts on the undercurrent of Enar’s feelings gleaned from the research shift. Their occasional traded wagers on who starts the next argument and over what keeps the despair of their dust-choked reality at bay. The thought sends his mood climbing in amused recollection.

“Doctor Parmak is meeting with us,” Nekot says. “All the heads of the field hospitals and the director of the Indar Central Hospital.”

“I thought Doctor Lajat was the hospital coordinator?

“Parmak’s replaced her recently. I guess you don’t get as much gossip on the night shift.”

“Of course I don’t, you did that on purpose.”

Not that it’s stopped him in the least. He has two slips of latinum wagered on Enar complaining about a power drain on her tricorder today which will end in Nekot sending the city doctor out of immunology care into the emergency ward without a single device capable of emitting electromagnetic signal for a whole shift. He’s at 82.5% odds.

Nekot’s eyebrow ridges climb. Even with fifteen centimeters on her, she always manages to cow Julian.

“I’ll make our case for more supplies and more staff, though I doubt he’ll hear them.”

“Have you met him before?” he asks. “I mean...he must be brilliant. Male doctors and all that.”

“Well,” she says, eyeing Julian carefully. “The Obsidian Order was never picky about gender _.”_

_Oh._ Oh.

Nekot quirks her lip at Julian’s horror and leans in, conspiratorial.

“Director Tain’s personal physician,” she whispers. “If you believe idle gossip.”

His climbing mood plummets back into its dusty trench. Julian’s blood trickles through him, glacial. _I never had to force Elim to do anything._ He remembers every time he restarted Tain’s heart in that prison camp. _I want him to grow old on that station surrounded by people who hate him._ He remembers Garak, begging for acknowledgement from a man who thought his son a weakness.

He lets himself hate Tain for a deep, long moment, then pulls it back in.

“Then I sincerely hope no word about me falls from your mouth,” he replies.

If any part of the Central Government, intelligence or otherwise, finds him, he’s either a dead man in their hands or in Section 31’s hands. Is the government even solidified enough to make a proper intelligence network? _Garak wouldn’t let you go,_ a hopeful voice urges. _Oh, yes he would. You didn’t send him anything for years and when you did it was too late. He ignored you. It’s what you deserve,_ says another.

“As far as any of us are concerned, you don’t exist,” she smiles. There’s a cold, familiar fire in her dark eyes. “I’ll remind Setek.”

“Oh, bloody — not this again!”

Nekot laughs at Julian’s embarrassment. And it’s not as if he minds the idea of...that. Setek is quite lovely, if a bit young. He looks forward to breakfast and gossip. If it were up to bodily pleasure alone it would be no issue. Flattering, really. After all, he’d fallen into bed with a new freighter captain or engineer or traveler on a near daily basis after Ezri left Deep Space 9. The most reliable way to keep his brain from eating itself alive.

But that life isn’t his. That life is over. Best not relive it. Best not get tangled up with someone he can’t love. _Again_. 

Nekot stops outside the emergency ward and sweeps her hand out towards the hospital doors, where hints of winter light peek over the soft gray expanse, cutting through the darkness. _Go home,_ she says. Sometimes, the dust clears enough to see the hills of the Northern Continent. Not today.

“Go rest, Baa’chir,” she says.

He half-bows, while she dips her chin. She disappears into the triage ward, releasing a small bubble of shouts and equipment noise before the door swings shut behind her.

He takes his respirator and goggles out of his bag. Adjusting them for a snug fit over his face, he sets out into the red-gray haze. He walks home in silence. 2.757 kilometers. Twenty-three minutes at his current pace. It will be days until there is enough solar power for skimmers and street illumination after the storm that rolled last evening. And so, the roads of Ik’kari, one of Indar’s few towns, sleep quietly, conserving heat and power until the sun comes out.

The morning sits at a crisp ten degrees centigrade. Cold for his colleagues, but Julian’s wool tunic and old uniform jacket keep his thin frame warm enough. He weaves through prefabricated houses and tents, expanses of rubble, patches of remarkably unscathed shops, watching the sky turn from black to gray.

Dust scrapes his cheeks.

By the time he arrives at the old guard’s station he lives in, pink tinges the horizon. The three moons are still somewhere above, unseen through the haze. He doesn’t bother undressing, only toeing off his boots to rest under his cot. The mask and goggles rest on a chair beside his cot over a halo of red-gray silt. He fills a saucepan with a water ration and coaxes the hot plate to life. And what a life. A ten foot square cabin with a single solar cell, a military cot, a few spare clothes, Kukalaka in a bag safe from the dust, and three real books.

The books are his only real luxury. The volume of Seamus Heaney’s poetry is a gift from Miles given after their disastrous landing on a planet of Jem’Hadar; a way of making amends after destroying Julian’s work. In turn, Julian let Miles tell him about the context of the poetry; how it came from a conflict of occupation and religious suppression. At first he read it to understand Miles, then to understand Bajor and Cardassia, and then to enjoy it in his own right. Garak liked it too, but he’d never readily admit it.

He kept Mikhail Bulgakov’s _A Country Doctor’s Notebook_ from Palis from their first and only anniversary and carries it with him to remember what he is. She knows now, he’s sure, why he broke it off. She would have seen the news and been grateful.

Iloja of Prim’s poetry anthology in its original Kardasi is a recent addition, having cost him his entire collection of datarods, _Crimson Shadow_ and all, at a discreet booksellers in Indari’or. He didn’t have enough power to run a PADD anyway. Jadzia would have liked it.

And so here he is: his old life, his old friends, wrapped up into three dust-coated books. But at least he has this life. At least it’s _his_ , for as long as Nekot keeps him out of the system and his biometric implant keeps his human trace masked.

The hot plate dims and Julian gives the power cell a tap. It gutters, then glows again.

“Come on,” he mutters, coaxing the water to bubble.

Waiting, he nibbles on a field ration bar and opens Iloja’s poetry. With how little solar power he can coax out of his generator, it will be three minutes before his water boils, then another four minutes to steep a packet of red-leaf tea. Enough time to let the exhaustion of another grueling night shift settle into his bones. Enough time to read _Dunes over Lakat_ , though a seventh perusal in as many months can hardly bestow upon him the symbolism of the scorpions in the ninth stanza.

He reads anyways in the dim light of the sun creeping over the horizon for the sheer need to occupy his brain with something other than emergent viruses, malnutrition, exposure, and complications from the dust storms.

Only three years prior, there would have been a research center blocking his view of the distant hills on the horizon. Now only dust remains. Dust, Chu’lian Baa’chir, and the sector five field hospital. Though hopefully, once his tea steeps and cools, there could be a little bit of sleep for him and this planet of ghosts.

All 800 million of them.

He’s glad he doesn’t count himself among them. Alive. For the first time in years, he feels alive.

—

“Doctor! We need a doctor!”

He wakes to a red haze and fists pounding on his door, a child screaming. He scrambles out of his cot, med-kit in hand, and barrels barefoot out of the door.

“Yes,” he pants to the shock-pale girl, her skin grimy with dust. “What is it?”

She runs, and he follows, avoiding smaller bits of rubble under foot. They run, run, run. Dust knifes with every lungful. His nose burns with the stench of ozone and metal.

She leads him to a boy in the dust, propped up on rubble, faint.

“Blood,” she says.

Julian crouches by the little boy, only the size of a seven year old human child, pale and coughing blood. It cuts red tracks through the dust on his chin. He puts a stethoscope to the bony, heaving chest under which his lungs crackle with the death-knell of dust pneumonia.

“How long has he been like this?” Julian asks.

“He’s been sick but he started like this on our way to the market,” says the girl, the words tumbling out so quickly the UT thrums in his head in a haste to keep up.

He swore he’d seen these children only a week ago, darting among the ruins. The girl’s hands twist into her skirts, eyes wide with terror, fixed on Julian as if she’s ready to bolt from his terrible, alien form.

“Anyone take care of you? Are you alone?”

“We’re alone,” she says. “I take care of him.”

“What’s his name?”

“Kalor,” she answers.

“And yours?”

“Gha—Ghadar,” she stammers.

“We have to take him to the hospital, Ghadar,” he says. “I need your help. I need to carry him, but I you to take my medical kit back to my house, can you do that?”

Something wild bursts out of her trepidation.

“I won’t leave him!” she blurts, looking him straight in the eyes.

“Then carry it with me, will you?” he says, stripping off his uniform jacket to wrap around the boy.

He places the stethoscope over Ghadar’s neck and closes the case. With a single, smooth motion, he lifts Kalor into his arms. The boy is too light, too thin, too cold. Julian arranges him onto his hip, tucking his head over Julian’s shoulder, and sets off barefoot to the hospital.

—

“I told you to _rest_ and here you are, not three hours later, back in my hospital!” Nekot exclaims, lifting the boy out of Julian’s arms and into a bed, scanner whipped out with unnerving speed.

“You can punish me later,” says Julian, searching for an oxygen line.

“Get Setek,” Nekot snaps, taking the tubing away from him. “And get out of my ward until you have some shoes on.”

He does as she asks.

Dizzy with exhaustion.

Lungs crackling with dust.

Dust runs red off his feet with blood in the sonic shower. He hasn’t been this blistered since he arrived in the Indar countryside and spent three days on his feet in triage.

On that day, the day he’d passed into Ik’kari from Indari’or, the dust had been yellow, blown in from the southern continent. It choked him, burned his eyes, coated his skin. He’d planned only on getting a skimmer to the next city, but he’d found the port closed, everyone running, the air shot with screams.

Three days. Three days of pulling bodies out of rubble. The collapsed mill still sits at the edge of town, a haunted testament to the fifty-three people who died that day. They didn’t need a miracle-worker or a Carrington award-nominee, they needed another set of indefatigable hands.

He coughs up mucus thick and choked with dust, red-gray.

Seven months ago it had been yellow, and he’d coughed and coughed into a tray in Nekot’s hand. He’d stayed in that cot for three more days, unable to speak, barely able to breathe.

“Stay,” she’d asked.

“Can’t,” he said. His throat burned. A film of metallic grit coated his tongue. He’d been running since he left Deep Space Nine almost three weeks ago and if he stopped now...if he stopped now... “Can’t.”

“You won’t be found,” she said. “Ik’kari owes you many lives.”

“Ik’...Ik’kari owes me nothing.”

“If we owe you nothing, it means you think our lives are worthless,” she’d hissed.

And so he stayed. His lungs healed. He found a place to live near the hospital and Nekot let him partner with Enar for research, though he could not put his name on the findings. His father would be _so_ proud.

Clean once more, he dresses quickly behind the curtain into his sonically sanitized uniform, stained abstractly with dark blotches no one could mistake for anything other than blood. He runs a dermal regenerator over a cut on his instep and a few of the worse blisters and puts on clean socks and his hospital shoes. They’re just a dust-free version of soldier’s boots. The trousers are soldier-issue too, worn from black to gray-blue from a daily run through the sonic cleaner. He tucks his shirt, light blue, long-sleeved and too big all around, into the front of the trousers with trembling hands.

He’s grateful for these small things. On this planet, hungry and thirsty, watching over his shoulder, luxuries few and far between, medical equipment reliant on the amount of charge they can demand from the solar grid that powers their farming town, he’s grateful for the small things. The flowers that grow in the shadow of the hospital. Red leaf tea. Kids playing in the street. The market. Gossip over breakfast. Having something to do without his brain tearing itself apart.

Back in the emergency ward, Nurse Setek has already hooked Kalor to a monitor, sedated him with an oxygen tube to help his lungs while the micro-transporter pulls out blood and dust and mucus.

“The girl?” Julian asks.

Setek points to the end of the ward, where a long bench holds waiting family members. He gives Setek a small smile, grabs a med-kit, and finds Ghadar sitting with her knees to her chest, staring blankly past him. Her fingers twist the fabric of her skirt rhythmically.

“Ghadar?” he asks as gently and reassuringly as he can. “Nurse Setek is doing everything he can for Kalor. Ghadar?”

She doesn’t look at Julian when he kneels down in front of her.Julian sighs. Her boots are thin-soled, too large, and cracked. Somehow, seeing them, buckles him. Someone should have taken care of her. She should have had a family. She should have shoes. She should have food and shelter.

“Ghadar,” he whispers, settling beside her. He touches her arm. Finally, _finally,_ her eyes refocus. She turns her head to the point of contact. “I know you’re tired. I’d like to give you some medicine. Is that alright?”

“To sleep?” she croaks, distrustful.

He shakes his head and opens his palms. _Genuine._

_“_ Electrolytes, vitamins, some sucrose, and hyronalin for any radiation exposure.”

She nods and lets him press the four hyposprays into her arm — a place he’s long learned to prefer over the sensitive neck.

“You should feel a little better soon,” he says, closing his med-kit. He lowers his voice. “You’re very brave.”

“I am alive,” she replies, matter-of-fact.

“If you’re up to walking, would you like some tea?” he asks.

Slowly, she nods. She hovers close to him as he leads her out of the emergency ward, down the narrow concrete hall lined with arches of dim lights spaced four meters apart — almost like the bulkheads on Deep Space 9 but without trip hazards. The staff room is quiet enough in the middle of a shift. Doctor Enan nurses a coffee in one corner while poring over her research. A nurse eats a ration bar at another table. He punches a raktajino, a red-leaf tea and a ration bar into the replicator. If the others notice him and Ghadar, they don’t show it.

She sips in silence. If she finds comfort in hot tea, it never shows on her guarded face. Ghadar is as thin as her companion — brother, fellow orphan, who knows — which makes her high cheekbones only more angular. Sharp, mercurial eyes watch him from under her brow ridges. She unwraps the ration bar.

“If you have questions, Doctor, _s’sava_ , ask them.”

“Will you answer them?” Julian asks.

She takes a bite of the mealy ration bar and chews.

“If it’s a good enough question,” she says.

Julian leans in, conspiratorial.

“Do you like the tea?”

She sips again, contemplative.

“It’s...replicated,” she says.

She doesn’t say it like a fact. It’s an opinion; she can taste the difference.

“You live in the camp?” Julian asks. “With Kalor?”

“Yes. Since the Fire.”

“Did you meet there, or did you know him...before?”

She considers him. “He was our neighbor’s nephew. I took him to town to get _gelat_ because my mother asked me to. We hid in the storeroom of the shop when the bombardment started. When it ended, there was nothing left of our houses but rubble. And nothing in there but corpses.”

Silence hangs. There are no words to account for the sorrow of 800 million ghosts.

“I’m sorry,” says Julian. “Did you have siblings?”

“Three older brothers. All glinns. All much older than me. They died one by one in the war. I barely knew them, except Jori,” she says.

“I envy you,” Julian says.

Ghadar’s head snaps up from her crumbling ration bar, eyes wide. Cardassian brows have less range than a less ridged species, but Julian’s spent seven years deciphering meaning and feeling behind Garak’s enigmatic, bright, blue eyes. She doesn’t know what to make of him.

“Envy me?”

“I always wanted siblings. I was...lonely...when I was your age. I had a hard time making friends.”

“Why?”

“My parents kept me away from other kids,” Julian says. At her questioning glance he continues. “They filled all my time with my schoolwork, music lessons, tennis lesson. I think the other kids resented me. I didn’t want the top marks or the awards. I just wanted people to like me. And the only time my parents liked me was when I was getting the awards and the marks.”

“It does sound lonely,” she says. “Are you still lonely? A _federaji_ on Cardassia?”

Julian shrugs. In truth, if he sits still enough, if he lets himself think about Deep Space Nine, about Miles and Keiko and their children growing up without him to see it, about Kasidy and Jake on Bajor, about Elim Garak on the same damn planet of dust and yet impossibly far, loneliness swallows him whole.

“I’m free on Cardassia. I’m happy for that.”

“Those things can taste bitter if you have no one to share them with,” Ghadar murmurs.

She takes another measured sip and frowns into her half-empty cup, far away. Julian wonders where she is. He knows where he is: at the replimat at lunch, in Quark’s, in the mess hall on the _Defiant_ at some undefinable time, having tea. He’s with Garak. Always with Garak.

Because even when there’s the pull to call Miles or Ezri and chat about nothing and everything, it’s different with Garak. It’s aways different. He doesn’t want to tell Garak about life on a dust-choked continent. He wants to wake up tangled up with him and press kisses to his palms and cheeks before tea and scones, the red morning sun spilling over them in slanting beams. He wants to be scolded with fond consternation when he leaves cups and plates and clothes everywhere. He wants to lay with his head in Garak’s lap under the light of a soft lamp and the three moons, a breeze filtering through the window while Garak’s hands card through his hair.

It’s such a tempting, painful fantasy. God, he’s lonely. And god, it hurts.

“Is El— Is Kalor going to die?”

Julian sighs, “I don’t know.”

Ghadar looks down at her cooling cup. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There will undoubtedly be more gratuitous use of [Glanmore Sonnets](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/48395/glanmore-sonnets)


	3. seven months earlier

_seven months earlier_

* * *

“One more immunization and you’ll be good to go,” says Nurse Jabara, pressing another hypospray into Kira’s neck.

“Thanks,” Kira replies, her foot tapping against the biobed of its own accord. “How have things been without Julian?”

“Oh, we manage,” Jabara says, popping another vial into the hypospray delivery. “How are you doing without your usual springball partner?”

“Fewer ankle strains, I’ll tell you that,” Kira smiles. “But it will be nice to get back on the court with someone who makes for a good challenge.”

“I just hope the leave on Earth does him good,” says Jabara. “I don’t want him coming back in the same mood he left in.”

Kira frowned.

“What mood was that?” Kira asked. “He seemed a little excited when he left.”

The hypospray presses into her neck.

“He was...I don’t know how to describe it...sometimes he acted like he was never going to see us again, and then later he’d act like he wasn’t even leaving. He was nervous. Hiding it, but nervous. I’ve spent a lot of time with Dr. Bashir, I know him.”

Kira gives Jabara a smile.

“Thanks. I wouldn’t worry about him,” she says.

But Kira worries.

Back in her office, she patches into a subspace channel.

“ _Thank you for contacting the Federation Subspace Communication Network. Specify channel routing.”_

“Earth,” says Kira. “Designation DB-104562, authorization Kira Six Alpha Nine.”

The comm begins to transmit with a steady beep, and Kira grabs a raktajino in while she waits.

“Nerys?”

“Miles!” says Kira, sitting up in her chair to get a better look at the familiar face. “How is the family?”

Miles, surrounded by shelves full of old equipment, beams.

“Oh, they’re grand. Keiko’s at work on a new project. Molly’s old enough to be talking about the Academy, of all things. Yoshi’s starting school in a few months. How about you?”

“Good,” she grins. “I’m good. It’s been quiet with Ezri on Trill the last year and _especially_ quiet with Julian on leave.”

“How is he?”

Kira grips her mug.

“I was just going to ask you that,” she says.

“I haven’t heard from him in a month.”

Her smile slips.

“But he took leave for Earth three weeks ago. On a direct flight. Are you telling me you didn’t know? That he didn’t visit?”

“He’s hard to get a hold of. He hasn’t been the same since...since the war ended.”

“Yeah,” she says.

“Did he arrive on Earth?”

“I didn’t think to check,” she says, and quickly pulls up the manifest from Julian’s transport. “One second. It says he got on the ship. It also says he got off at the Jupiter Starport for a shuttle.”

“What shuttle did he take?”

“A passenger craft called the Byzantine. It landed sixteen days ago outside London. Do you have a trace on him on your local networks? That’s the end of my access.”

“One second,” Miles mutters, a line creasing between his brows. “He landed alright. There’s no record of him, Nerys. No transports. No skimmers. Nothing.”

“Miles...how does someone disappear from a planet?”

“On purpose,” he says, grim, his soft face showing the age around his eyes. “Or against their will.”

“Nurse Jabara said Julian was nervous before he left. Skittish, you know? But maybe it’s nothing serious. Maybe he just wanted to be left alone for a few weeks. To have some quiet in the countryside...or the city. I think he hates feeling like someone knows where he is all the time.”

“For gods sake, Nerys, I hope you’re right.”

“He’s supposed to get on that shuttle back in a few hours, we can save our worries for then.”

“Yeah,” he says. “I’ll keep an eye on it. Call again soon, Nerys. Keiko and the kids miss you something fierce.”

“I miss them too. Kira out.”

The screen turns black as Miles’ face blinks out. She has four hours to know if Julian’s coming back to Deep Space 9. Might as well get some work done.

—

“There’s a message for you, Colonel Kira,” says Major Ekad.“From Doctor Bashir.”

“Oh, thank the Prophets,” she breathes. “Patch it through.”

Her relief is short lived. The message is audio only, dated from a month ago, and originated from Julian’s own quarters.

“ _Hi Nerys. If you’re getting this message it means I’m...I’m not coming back. Otherwise I would have deleted this message before it was scheduled to send. I can’t stay here. I know I can’t. If you’re seeing this, I’ve tended my resignation to Starfleet. They will notify you shortly,”_ said Julian. He took a sharp, shuddering breath. _“It was an honor to serve with you, Colonel. It was an honor to see your home, to defend it, and to feel like a very small part of it.”_

The message ends.

She slams her fist on the table.

“Julian!” Half the staff outside her door jolt. “This isn’t an explanation! Where’s the explanation!”

She tears into Ops.

“Someone route me all of Dr. Julian Bashir’s official and personal logs dating back ninety days,” she said. “And tell Doctor Dapam he’s our new Chief Medical Officer. I have a call to make.”

But back in her office, the comm blinks.

“Miles!” says Kira.

Miles’ unsmiling face stares back at her.

“I set up a search net after you called for Julian. He didn’t get on the shuttle. An automated resignation letter was sent to Starfleet the second that shuttle left. And I got a message too. Pre-recorded.”

“I did too. Did he explain anything to you?”

“No!” Miles said. “Nine years we’re friends and nothing! Do you want me to play it for you?”

 _“_ Sure,” said Kira.

He presses a few buttons on the comm and Julian’s twice-distorted voice, tired yet lilting, comes through.

 _“Miles,”_ he said, inhaling sharply. “ _If you’re hearing this...I...I have decided to leave Starfleet and Deep Space 9. I can’t stay here. Give Keiko and the kids my love. You’ve been a good friend.”_

There’s a long pause before Julian speaks again.

_“‘Not the one who takes up his bed and walks/ But the ones who have known him all along/ And carry him in –‘_

_“‘Their shoulders numb, the ache and stoop deeplocked/ In their backs, the stretcher handles/ Slippery with sweat. And no let up’_

_“‘Until he’s strapped on tight, made tiltable/ and raised to the tiled roof, then lowered for healing./ Be mindful of them as they stand and wait’_

_“‘For the burn of the paid out ropes to cool,/ Their slight lightheadedness and incredulity/ To pass, those who had known him all along.’”_

The message ends.

“Was that a poem?”

“Bloody Seamus Heaney,” Miles says. “Guess I’m not surprised he actually read that collected set I gave him.”

“What did he mean by it? That he’s going somewhere to be a doctor?”

He shakes his head.

“I don’t think he could go anywhere without being a doctor,” he says. “He’s saying it to me...I think he’s trying to thank me for something, for helping him in some way, healing. I don’t know.”

“A healed man doesn’t run off without telling anyone,” Kira says.

“I know. That’s what a haunted one does.”

“Miles...at what point do we call him?”

“Now. We call him now.”

“I’m going to look through Julian’s messages first and then call him. I don’t even know if they’re on speaking terms.”

“Ok. I’ll keep looking. Keiko will want to know. I don’t —“ he sighs, a broken sound. “I don’t know how to tell her. This is awful. I thought we were done losing our own.”

“He’s not dead as far as we know, Miles.”

“As far as we know,” he says. “Good night, Nerys.”

“Good night,” she replies, not bothering to correct him.

The chronometer reads 1623.

Her team has at least patched through Julian’s inbox and logs. She combs through the fifty-three missed comms and messages in the last month. Ezri, Miles, Keiko, Jake. General greetings, updates about children or the Academy or Trill science or requests to explain medical terms in news reports. These correspondences happen every two weeks or so. One monthly one from his mother, telling Julian she loves him and that they’ve settled in a place called Italy, describing the food and the countryside. None from Garak.

This strikes her.

Garak sends her comms rather frequently, asking for an ear and advice from someone whose planet has also suffered. He even reads some of the Bajoran poetry she sends him, and he’ll politely compliments turns of phrase or a particularly melodic stanza. She was surprised by his openness, until he sent her a transcript of Hebitian writing from memory. _This exists now only in memory,_ he’d said, _but I still hope to find something in the dust._ The spirituality touches her.

If he can write to Kira, who would have happily seen him dead for years, he can write Julian, his closest friend on the station. Not for the first time, Kira wonders what lay tangled between them that bore no witnesses. She’d seen them move around each other with her own eyes — in perfect synchrony, aware of every step, rapid back and forth conversation that never lingered on small pleasantries and always seemed to mean more than what was said. They moved like old friends. Sometimes like _more_ than old friends. They _knew_ each other. More than men who’d shared combat. More than what came from a heated two-man book club at the replimat.

But it seems little remains of that friendship. And little remains of that Julian Bashir. A hollow sort of sadness twinges in her to remember how electric and passionate Julian once was, how recklessly naive and charming and irritating and how much they’d all damn learned to love it. He’s smoothed over now. Emptied of something.

Nothing from Garak. She expands the search back months, even years, and doesn’t see a single letter. Can she call Garak about this if they aren’t on speaking terms? How is he supposed to know where Julian might be? Will he care?

She lets out a long exhale, rubbing her face with her hands. Why now? Why Julian? Why like this? How could he leave with no farewell, no mention of where he was going?

“Computer, patch me into Elim Garak’s comm channel on my private terminal, hard encryption. Authorization Kira, passcode ‘ _I dream of the shores of Lakat, water run clear, wind through the grasses. I dream of a Free Cardassia.’”_

The signal begins transmitting, a steady pulse among the hum of the station.

She thinks about that basement and the nights suffocated in quiet until Garak started reciting poetry before sleep. All eras, all subjects. Love, war, obedience, rebellion, death, life. She liked Iloja’s best. It reminded her of Jadzia.

She falls asleep waiting for the answering beep.

“Colonel Kira?”

“Hmm?” Kira says, waking with a start. “Oh, Prophets, Councillor.I must have fallen asleep.”

Garak, thinner and sharper-eyed than she remembers him, stares from the screen. Unlike the last time she called, his tunic and skin are clean of Cardassia’s yellow dust.

“You waited for my answer for five hours. It must be serious, Colonel.”

“It might be,” she says. “I haven’t seen you in a while, though. You’re looking better.”

“Democratic work is a little less strain on my wardrobe than my previous occupation, yes.”

“It suits you,” she says, jutting her chin in acknowledgement of his tunic of thick red linen, a little creased around the elbows.

“Thank you, but you didn’t call to discuss my wardrobe,” says Garak.

“No, I called to talk about Julian,” she says.

“I’m afraid we have not spoken in quite some time, Colonel. I fail to —”

“He’s resigned his commission. Garak, he’s _missing_.”

“What?” Garak hisses.

“He left me and Miles a prerecorded message, left three weeks ago for Earth, and hasn’t been seen since.”

Garak blanches.

“Did he give any indication as to why?”

“No, he just told us that he couldn’t stay,” Kira said. “And I won’t lie. I am worried. It’s not like him to abandon something, even with how he’s been.”

“What do you mean ‘how he’s been’?”

“Closed off, overworking himself, and a complete nuisance to the security staff.”

“Dr. Bashir has always been a nuisance,” he says. “but to security staff?”

“He’s...well...promiscuous. That isn’t new. What is new is that he’s rather indiscreet about it. That and the drinking. He wasn’t great when Ezri left him, but he really started to slide six months ago.”

Silence stretches.

“I see,” Garak says.“Colonel, you had a tormented man on your hands.”

“Help me find him.”

“Nerys, he sounds like a man who doesn’t want to be found.”

“If he’s in danger, he needs help. What could he be running from? What could possibly be so dangerous to Julian that he’d slip away like this?”

“Kira!” Garak hisses. The clear warning fells her silent. He chews over something. “I can get a transport to Deep Space 9 in two weeks time. We’ll talk then.”

 _Keep quiet,_ he begs her. _Keep this quiet._ It worries her.

“Of course,” she promises. “Of course.”

_—_

“What can I get for you, Colonel?” Quark asks.

“Springwine,” she sighs, resting her forehead in her hands.

The bar sits at the inflection point between mostly tame venue for after-shift drinks and debauched casino. The air thrums.

She remembers catching Julian at Quark’s before he left for Earth, deep into several glasses of his medicinal-smelling drink of choice. His glassy eyes had slowly focused on her as she sat next to him at the bar.

“You know what I really want, Kira?” he’d said. “A taste of _civit._ ”

When they drank they usually did so in quiet camaraderie, but it seemed Julian was in an usually chatty mood. That is, he said two sentences to her. She should have known something was up but she’d been disarmed by his inebriation, by his newly trimmed yet uncombed hair, the sharp look in his eyes.

“And how does a man like you know anything about _civit?_ ” Quark butted in. “Springwine, Colonel?”

“I had it once,” Julian shrugged.

“What is it?” said Kira and nodded for her wine, which found its way into her hands at warp speed.

“It’s a Cardassian liquor,” said Quark. Kira furrowed her brow at the instinctual twinge in her chest. “Impossible to get before the war and now, well, let’s just say if there are any distilleries left on Prime, there isn’t any _leejat_ to harvest. With 800 million people dead and climbing, I don’t see the Cardassians making _civit_ for a long, long time.”

“ _Thanks,_ Quark,” Julian hissed.

His eyes had _burned_ with something. It was the first time she’d seen that fire in a long time.

“You’re very welcome, Doctor Bashir.”

He regarded Quark while the bartender ignored his stare. He looked like a man weighing something.

“I have a question for you, Quark,” he said. “Who do you think was the love of my life?”

“Pardon?”

“You heard me. Who did I love the most? Not just infatuation. I mean once-in-twenty lifetimes, go-to-the-edge-of-the-galaxy, betray-everything-I-hold-dear kind of love. The kind of love that ruins you for anyone else. The kind of love that rearranges you at the sub-atomic level until you’re locked in a synchronous spin state that pulls you across light-years.”

Kira blinks. Julian had always been an incurable romantic, in love with love itself, but there’s a gravity, a crackling intensity that sends a prickle down her spine.

“I can only speculate for this station,” Quark cautioned.

“Speculate,” Julian hissed, reached over the counter and placed a slip of latinum into Quark’s breast pocket.

He patted the chest pocket a little too tenderly. Quark smiled. Smiled like he’d thwarted every game of dabo in his favor, smiled like he had a week’s worth of nonrefundable holosuite cancellations, smiled like he had a belly full of fried tube grubs.

“Dax,” he said.

And Julian had smiled back, cold and triumphant.

“ _Thank you,_ ” he said.

Something felt off about the whole thing, something dishonest and shrouded. That kind of off-kilter feeling when the artificial grav was mis-calibrated and one’s steps alternated between too light and too heavy, limbs readjusting to their own changing weight.

“What was that about?” Kira asked.

“Oh,” Julian shrugged, still smiling. The cold gleam warmed a little as he turned to her. “Just looking for some clarity.”

“Is he right?”

“What do you think?” he asked, shifting to flex his long, languid limbs.

Prophets, what an enigmatic man. He was such a far cry from the springtime lamb who’d dreamed of heroism on the frontier, yet he hummed with a magnetic youthfulness despite the deepened lines around his mouth and the darker hollows under his eyes. Ah, the eyes. The expressive mouth. Incorrigible charm that could pull just about anyone into bed with him. (One could be fully immune but not blind).

And yet, so cold. Nothing put Kira off him more than those smiles that didn’t quite reach his eyes. She couldn’t help but feel like she’d missed something important. Like even now, he concealed something.

Kira considered him. “You haven’t been the same since Ezri left.”

“No, I guess I haven’t,” he said. His smile slanted. A real feeling, fierce and warm, flickered like a prayer flame in his eyes. “But it’s hard to...convince yourself you’re in the right place when someone you loved and used to share this...this station with has left.”

“You’re being unusually honest,” Kira said.

“I try to tell the truth on principle.”

“Those aren’t the same thing, Julian,” Kira said softly. “I’m sorry you’re...”

“Grieving?”

“Yeah,” said Kira.

Julian sighed and shooed off a smug-looking Quark from refilling his drink.

“I think I’ll miss that little git,” he murmured.

“Three weeks isn’t enough time to miss him.”

“Oh, nonsense,” Julian smiled, broad and genuine. “Where on Earth am I supposed to get Saurian brandy?”

It was the last time she’d seen him; he’d left early the next morning before their usual breakfast and she’d thought none the wiser of it.

Now though...now the memory recontextualizes itself. Painfully. Obviously. He knew he was never coming back.

“This is for you,” Quark says, startling her out of her recollection.

She finds her springwine and an envelope waiting for her.

“What’s this?”

“I don’t know,” he says. “But it’s from Dr. Bashir.”

A knife of fury shoots through her. She should have denied his leave request. She should have wrung out his skinny little neck. Had she conjured this piece of paper thinking about Julian?

“What did he tell you?” she snaps.

“Woah,” said Quark, his hands flying into the air. “Don’t shoot the messenger. I was told to give this to you today.”

Her nostrils flare. Quark pulls back further.

“Quark, did you know he was leaving?”

“Yeah, of course I know when the senior staff goes on leave,” says Quark, scoffing derisively. 

“No. Not ‘on leave’. He’s _left._ He’s left the station and he’s left Starfleet.”

“What?”

The hurt on Quark’s face can't be faked.

“Don’t worry I’ll pay his tab,” says Kira.

“No...no,” Quark shakes his head, blank shock etched on his face, voice gone soft. His hand slides listlessly off the counter, the other barely holding a green glass bottle. “He always paid on time.”

“Not every day you lose such a good...” Kira starts.

“Doctor?”

“—Customer.”

They fall silent.

Kira runs her fingers over the folded envelope edges. The day had started _fine._ Everything was _fine._ A smooth senior staff meeting covering preparations for a Vulcan dignitary. A good stretch of uninterrupted time reviewing the shift schedules, the docking schedules, the leave requests, staffing requests, transfer orders, and a few communiques from the Bajoran Council. A pleasant lunch with Laren followed, and after that, her appointment for a new round of vaccinations. That infirmary without Bashir, as much as she liked Jabara, lacked a certain something that put her at ease. Perhaps it was Julian himself.

Prophets, _damn him._ Damn him for leaving her alone on this station, damn him for _hoping_ he’d leave, damn him for doing it in the most agonizing way possible. This isn’t a holonovel or some _game_ where he can leave little convoluted clues and messages and leave the burden on Kira to piece them together.

She opens the letter.

_Nerys —_

_I will likely be unable to do this properly myself for some time and as such I require a favor. Not for me. I would not presume to ask for a favor when you’re angry with me._

Well, he got that much right. But her anger ebbs away into something else as she reads on.

_I am asking if you could take over a certain ritual of mine. On the tenth day of the tenth month, I light the duranja lamp in the temple for Sito Jaxa. I have done so since my second year on the station. Since she was killed in action. I met her in the last few weeks of my time at Starfleet Medical. She was at the Academy. A patient. A friend. One of the bravest people I ever knew. A hero to me when I desperately needed a glimpse of real courage. I never explained our meeting words. Perhaps you might understand them now, and understand a part of why I chose to come to Deep Space Nine._

_She was important to me, and her spirituality was important to her. I know that you can honor her soul in the traditional way while I will keep her in my memory._

_— Julian_

She sits at the bar, reeling.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Julian's friendship with Sito Jaxa is from [Cruel are the Times](https://archiveofourown.org/works/16632212/chapters/38991917). Poor Kira's overwhelmed.


	4. from the hiding places

> Sensings, mountings from the hiding places,
> 
> Words entering almost the sense of touch
> 
> Ferreting themselves out of their dark hutch—
> 
> ‘These things are not secrets but mysteries,’
> 
> Oisin Kelly told me years ago
> 
> In Belfast, hankering after stone
> 
> That connived with the chisel, as if the grain
> 
> Remembered what the mallet tapped to know.
> 
> Then I landed in the hedge-school of Glanmore
> 
> And from the backs of ditches hoped to raise
> 
> A voice caught back off slug-horn and slow chanter
> 
> That might continue, hold, dispel, appease:
> 
> Vowels ploughed into other, opened ground,
> 
> Each verse returning like the plough turned round.
> 
> — _Glanmore Sonnets II, Seamus Heaney_

“You’re very strange but very warm,” Ghadar says.

Shivering against his chest, she sits in his lap wrapped up in his uniform jacket. Julian pulled her there after she’d fallen asleep on the floor beside Kalor’s cot, and as defiant as she was, she’d been too exhausted to argue with such a tempting heat source.

“We produce heat our whole bodies, not just the muscles,” he says.

Kalor’s been unconscious for twelve hours and despite the electrolytes and antibiotics, he isn’t any better. Julian can’t remember being so haggard, so exhausted. At least, not for years.

“Why?”

“It’s a matter of physiology. We trade off the energy expenditure of making enzymes that work at many different temperatures to maintain a constant core temperature, whereas you have organs which heat your muscles, especially when you’re moving.”

“It could be nice, I think, to be warm,” she says.

He laughs low in his chest, secretly as grateful as she to have something to hold onto while he keeps an eye on Kalor’s monitor and the clear tube down his mouth, slowly siphoning out dust-choked blood and mucus. He knows the chances are slim for a malnourished orphan with pneumonia from dust and exposure. He’s seen it over and over again as erosion grips the Northern Continent, as it chokes Ik’kari and all of Indar. They’re always too young. He lost four his first week in Indar. He holds Ghadar closer.

She’s twelve, if he can hedge a guess. Eloquent, brash, and thin. She deserves to go to school, to have a home to come back to, to have a warm bed and a good meal and to care about frivolous things like if she wants to play ten’kat or read a tale about riding hounds.

“Do you have any stories?”

“What kind of stories?”

“About you,” she says. “Where you came from, or why you came here.”

“I—”

“It doesn’t have to be true,” she says.

God help him, he’s known her all of three hours.

“The best stories are true,” he says. “Did you know I once went to a Klingon bachelor party?”

“What’s that?”

“Oh, on Earth we have an old tradition where, before getting married, a person’s friends throw them a party. It used to be rather crass, celebrating the last moments of apparent freedom before marriage, but now it's more a celebration with friends. And so I agreed when my Klingon friend asked me to join his,” Julian says. “Little did I know I was setting myself up for a three day fast — no sleep — in fourty-degree heat, hanging for hours my by arms in Klingon armor, and fighting until I fainted.”

“Was your Klingon friend fierce?”

“Oh very much so, but he was incredibly dull as well. Bone-dry humor, completely duty-bound, hated indulgence.”

“It’s not how I have heard Klingons described,” she says.

“Ah, well I think that’s because he’s Russian,” Julian smiles to himself. “It’s a region of Earth, known for bitter cold and bitter people. He was adopted.”

“A _mor’vatsi_?”

“And now he’s the Klingon ambassador to the Federation.”

“If you know Ambassadors, how did you end up in this cursed town? This is a forsaken planet.”

“Well,” he says, swallowing past a tightness in his chest. “Part of me always wanted to come here, but I was afraid to leave my old life. Then someone told me I had to do something I thought was wrong and I knew I had to leave.”

“Your Federation?”

“Yes.”

“You disobeyed your State.”

“Obeying meant betraying something important to me.”

“What is more important to a _Federaji_ than the Federation?”

“To me? Being free to choose my own life, even if it means exile. Being able to help with my own hands, not from far away. Being a doctor.”

“Even if you are cold,” she murmurs. “And there is no food in your belly, and the people around you hate you?”

“Yes.”

Ghadar hums softly into his chest.

“You are strange,” she says.

“I know,” he replies.

“I like your accent. You speak well, even if your words are class-mixed.”

“Thank you,” he laughs.

She dozes off to sleep not long after. Julian is left to watch Kalor’s unsteady chest rise and fall. Dry gray skin peeks through a coat of dust around his mouth. The scales around his eyes are inflamed and flaky. His black hair is short and choppy, as if shorn with a knife.

Julian’s own hair is long enough to tuck behind his ears. It would be longer had Doctor Nekot not taken a pair of scissors to it last week, badgering him about unseemly mammalian hair. He keeps a stubbly beard to shield his fragile human skin from the dust. His patients think of it as some sort of curious armor. He’s happy to amuse them. It makes them fear him less.

Julian dozes off not long after Ghadar, comforted by her tepid warmth and steady breathing. He dreams of a garden. Of grass-covered dunes. Of a clear sky and hot sun, the air resplendent with orchids. He dreams of a hand in his. Palm sliding over palm. Fingers grazing over fingers. Wrist to wrist. Entwined. Inextricable. No ending. No beginning. He doesn’t know when it began, but he knows where. In his dream he gives in a hundreds times, each of them different. He gives in to the hands on his shoulders. He gives in to the rush of adrenaline and danger. He gives in to his better nature. He gives in to a gnawing hunger. He gives in to a deliberate distance he made. In his dream he doesn’t pull away afraid.

In his dream he isn’t afraid.

He arrives at a door and offers his heart like a fresh kill. _Take it_ , he says. _Take it. I want no other knife but yours._

—

He signs the death certificate at 0753 the next morning.

“Did you know his full name, Ghadar?” he asks, his throat dry and tight.

The girl stares numbly at Kalor’s still form on the hospital bed. She’s huddled in Julian’s uniform jacket.

“Elim,” she whispers, as staggering as a shot to the heart. “Elim Kalor.”

He folds into the chair beside the dead boy, his knees unable to hold him. The two gorges of grief running through him meet, crack the banks, overflow. Ghadar lets him cry into her shoulder. Her fragile hands hold on to his sleeve.

He doesn’t know when Nekot pulls him away or how he finds himself in her office with a cup of tea in front of him. Tarkalean. He hasn’t smelled it in so long. How long? How long? How long? Eight months. _Come on, Julian._ Eight months and three days. Time swims. How long has he been here? Twelve days on the transport to Earth. Fifteen days back. A day in Indari’or. Seven months and five days in Ik’kari. How long? The night before Cole. The night before. A Tarkalean tea in his quarters before dinner at Quark’s. Eight months, three days, thirteen hours, twenty nine minutes, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen —

“Chul’ian?”

Julian blinks.

“Drink.”

His hands fumble for the cup. It’s scorching against his fingertips, so he holds it by the handle.

“I’m relieving you of duty for tonight’s shift,” she says, fixing a second cup of tea.

He sips. Scalding. Ghadar is Molly’s age, and Julian remembers that he may never see Miles or Keiko or their kids again.

“Is she okay? Ghadar?” Julian asks.

“She’s grieving and frightened and exhausted. Setek says she’s asleep in the break room,” Nekot says.

“What’s…what’s going to happen to her?” Julian rasps.

Nekot shakes the strainer holding the tea leaves, and amber liquid drips back into the pot.

“She will go back to living wherever she was,” Nekot says. She puts the strainer on a spare plate. “As has everyone who has stepped out of our hospital. Our jobs are not to find homes for every stray child.”

Steam coils from the pot as Nekot pours her own cup.

“That isn’t fair.”

The second sip of his tea isn’t any cooler but his taste buds are already burnt off the tip of his tongue. What he can taste is sweet, a little smoky, with the lingering flavor of licorice.

“Of course it isn’t!” she snaps. “It wasn’t fair of the Dominion to order our cities flattened for Legate Damar’s rebellion! It wasn’t fair for us to pay the price for Gul Dukat’s avarice! And it isn’t fair now that our planet is collapsing under the dust and the weight of the dead. Or, at least, Indar is. We are the last. Even Lakat has power. Lakat! Where there lay two million unburied souls.”

Damn her, does she think he doesn’t know? That he doesn’t feel the weight of that loss, doubled over with the weight of Garak’s loss?

“I could take care of her,” Julian says.

Nekot sets the cup down with a _clack_ on her desk.

“No.”

“I could,” he says.

“You just lost a patient, you can’t bring their sister home.”

“He was her neighbor’s nephew. Her family is dead,” Julian bites out.

“And so is mine,” Nekot says. “No.”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Because I want to! There’s no need for her to sleep in a camp. I can make space for her. I can read to her. Teach her mathematics. Engineering. Whatever she wants. She’ll have a proper roof to sleep under. I can learn to cook. I know I can’t take in every orphan that comes through the hospital but it doesn’t mean I can’t help one.”

“You can’t keep her,” Nekot says. “An alien, keeping a little girl. They’ll think the worst.”

“How can I leave her?”

He thinks of Ghadar’s fierce stare, demanding to stay. How can he do any less for her? How can he leave her alone when she’s watched her only friend die?

“You _must.”_

“No,” he hisses. “I know her staying with me will put both her and me in danger. I know I won’t leave her alone. So give me another option.”

Nekot stares, her mouth parted.

“Chu’lian,” she says, her eyes closing. She looks closer to her sixty years than he’s ever seen, slowly yielding to time. He needs her to yield to this.

“Give me another option,” Julian says.

They stare.

“Go home and get your things,” she says finally. She opens her palm for him. “I have a room.”

He presses his palm to hers, his breaths ragged with the weight of his gratitude.

“I know I have asked more of you than I deserve,” Julian says. “But I need you to promise me something.”

“Only if I can carry it out.”

“You can. I’m not...alone anymore. You remember when I first came here and ended up in the middle of triage?”

“How could I forget?” Nekot says. “We lost so many when the mill collapsed.”

“You remember how I didn’t think I could stay, but you promised to keep me off the network?” Julian presses. She nods again, wary. “If I ever, ever go missing, Nekot, you have to call a man named Garak. Tell him everything. How I got here, anything you’ve kept quiet for me.”

“And how am I supposed to contact him?”

“He’s in the Paldar Sector of Cardassi’or,” Julian says. “If you make even a small inquiry he’ll know. I’m serious. If I ever can’t be found here or at the hospital or in town, call. Don’t hesitate.”

“Who is this Garak?”

“An old friend,” he says. “He’s on the council.”

“You have a friend on the council,” she deadpans. “Bashir, next thing you’ll tell me is that you know the Federation President.”

“I don’t,” he shrugs. “But I was in prison with the Klingon Chancellor.”

“Human humor,” Nekot scoffs, then narrows her eyes. “You aren’t joking, are you.”

Julian grins.

“You are incorrigible. Shall I call your dear Mr. Garak to collect you now?” she smiles back, sharp teeth glinting.

Julian’s grin slips. A plucked memory hums around him. So hungry he couldn’t think. The pain in his flank. Cold, always cold. Filthy. Setting Martok’s elbow over and over and over again. _Begin again._ His hand over Tain’s mouth, forcing his heart to restart. _Bare handed surgery, Doctor?_ Searing pain down his back and shoulder. It’s not supposed to hurt. God, the osteotractor isn’t supposed to hurt. Blinding light for the first time in five cycles and Garak’s familiar face. _Please, father._ A wall panel and Garak’s halting breaths and racing heart. _For once in your life speak the truth!_

“Baa’chir?”

“Sorry, I was remembering something,” he says.

She presses her fingers to his temple and frowns.

“Sleep,” she says, jerking her head to the cot tucked behind her desk. “I’ll have Setek get all your things. You’re in no state to go anywhere.”

He drains his tea, and doesn’t argue.

—

People move around his cot. They murmur. Furtive whispers, indiscernible words. _Pyramidal neurons of the medial cortex._ Strange sounds that don’t mean anything. He should be sleeping. Someone told him he’s supposed to be asleep, that he isn’t going anywhere until he rests. He doesn’t want to get in trouble. Mama and Da told him he was supposed to be good and listen to the doctors.

Someone touches his arm, gently pulling the sleeves back. _Don’t be scared._ But soft touches sometimes hurt. _Be good, habibi._ He doesn’t understand, doesn’t understand why sometimes things that touch him hurt and poke or tingle and tickle. _I don’t consent._ The hand wrenches his arm down. His wrists are taped down to the chair by a pair of rough and uncaring hands. Gray shapes move in and out of the glare of a bright light. He can’t see their faces but he knows they’re hateful and cruel.

 _I’m a Starfleet Officer. I am a citizen of the Federation._ But he’s six, he doesn’t know anything about Starfleet or the Federation. He doesn’t understand this. Jules wonders who this grown up in his head is. Someone grabs him by the hair and wrenches his head back. He’s afraid. They’re going to kill him when they get the information they want. What information? He’s six. He doesn’t understand this. He doesn’t know why he’s here.

 _Stop,_ he thinks. _I don’t want this._ He doesn’t want to die. He wanted to help. He just wanted to help. Where’s Jake? Where is he? He looks down at his left arm and sees twisted red skin. _Third degree._ Bone pokes out of his elbow. _Partial fourth degree._ His nerves have been burned away and it’s not supposed to hurt, so he grabs the generator. But he can’t.

He can lift it on his own, he didn’t need Jake. But his hand doesn’t work, not taped down. He can’t move, not with a painful fist in his hair. The furious figures stick something to his head. _Be good, Jules._ Then his head splits open.

Blinding agony. _It hurts. God, it’s not supposed to hurt._ Thoughts ripping through his mind. Creetak. Biomimetic gel. Sloan. Section 31. _No, I don’t want this! Stop! Stop!_ He kicks and pulls against the restraints, no longer caring if he’s good, no longer caring if he’s in trouble because they’re _hurting_ him.

_I’m also sorry about your friend Garak._

He knows who Garak is, but how? He was supposed to do something. Supposed to say something. Something important. _Oh god, it hurts!_ He trembles in his pajamas, terrified. He’s so terrified. _It seems he has a new lunch companion._ Wet. His pajamas are wet. He looks down at his shirt and the left side of his chest is stained with blood.

He’s not a boy. This isn’t a boy’s body. _Jules?_ No, Julian. _Neurocortical probe_. Oh, god it _hurts. Stimulating synaptic growth_. His hands are are still strapped down.

“Come on, _Doctor,_ surely all your genetic gifts prepared you for this?”

One of the figures comes into focus. A cruel, square, dispassionate face. Pale eyes. Fear and revulsion flare up in him and he pulls and kicks against the restraints while the probe to his head drives knives into his skull.

No, _no!_ Sloan is dead. But Sloan is here, and Julian is no longer strapped down to the chair. He’s beside Sloan, looking down at himself. _Jules._ A six year old boy. A mop of dark brown hair. Scrawny. Shaking.

He lunges to free Jules, but he can’t move.

“Ach, ach, Doctor,” says Sloan. “We need to _fix_ him.”

“We don’t!” Julian says, finding his voice. Even if it comes out small and plaintive. “Can’t you see he’s terrified? Can’t you see he’s shutting down little by little from how scared he is?”

“How about a little _gratitude_ for all the sacrifices your Mum and I made?” barks Richard Bashir. He comes up behind Sloan and slits his throat with a knife. “You’re acting like a spoiled child!”

“Get away from us!” Julian shouts, pushing to move. Why do his legs weigh so much? Why is it so hard? His body won’t cooperate. “You’re a monster! You _killed_ Sloan!”

“No, _you_ killed Sloan,” his father sneers. “Monster. Freak.”

In his ear, a woman’s voice whispers, “ _Abomination_.”

He whirls. Palis. Her face twists in fury.

“You _killed_ him!” she cries, pointing not to Sloan, but to Jules now sobbing silently behind Julian. “ _Ça me dégoûte_!”

He’s still bleeding from a cut in his neck. Blood on the floor under Sloan’s body. _Stop! Stop it!_

“What are you going to do, run?” Kira scoffs. “I forget you don’t know what it’s like to live in fear.”

“Doctor, I’m afraid I won’t be able to have lunch with you today,” says Garak.

And Garak slumps, the light fading from his eyes.

Julian’s own sobbing wakes him.

The pillow beneath his head is drenched in tears, cold against his neck. Through the small, high window in Nekot’s office, the sky is dark. A nightmare. Just a nightmare. Steeling himself and wiping the unconscious tears away, he gets up to find Dr. Nekot.

—

“You cried when you learned his name,” Ghadar whispers in the dark of Nekot’s spare room.

They lie in the dark amongst someone else’s childhood. Toys and books and clothes gone but their echo remaining. Ghadar lies on it now, while he rests on a mat on the floor beside her. She’s tucked into his uniform jacket, refusing to be parted from it even while under a sturdy blanket.

Ghadar’s fingers curl into his sleeve, and Julian has to hold the well of tears in his eyes again. He thinks about the death certificate he signed early this morning. He thinks about everyone he loved, packed into three books in the corner with his piled things.

“Yes,” he says.

“Did you lose an Elim?”

He feels the hot salt tracks run down his temples as he blinks. He doesn’t trust his voice to break.

“Something like that,” he whispers.

Ghadar shifts in her cot and stretches to curl her hand over his arm.

“How...how did you lose him?”

“I...I lost him a lot of times. Little by little. Every time I knew what I wanted, every time I knew how I felt and ignored it. Every time I retreated instead of confronting. I was always afraid, but I lost him when I started listening to my fear,” he confesses into the dark.

The pillow on either side of his ears sticks to his neck, cold and wet.

“What were you afraid of?”

“I had a secret I didn’t want found out. A secret that’s caught up to me now, but at the time, nothing was more important than my commission. During the war; I was found out but I was allowed to keep my job. I didn’t want to give them an excuse to kick me out. And he was a spy. A defector. A tentative ally but always, at the end of the day, an enemy.”

“You loved him,” she breathes.

Julian twists the fabric of his shirt over his chest. Almost a whole decade of loving someone against all odds. A love that pours out of him like an uncauterized wound, staining everything he touches. All of Cardassia, red.

“He was my friend. And a good man. I didn’t want to put us in danger. So I lost him.”

Ghadar shifts again. In the dark he senses her looking down at him from her cot, head propped up on one elbow. Her vision is better than his so he knows she can see his swollen, tear stained face. He wishes he could see hers. Maybe it's easier this way.

“That’s very Cardassian of you, Doctor Baa’chir, _s’sava._ ”

“Maybe,” he laughs. He swallows around the lump in his throat. “You can, um, call me Julian.”

“Chul’ian?”

“Yes.”

She’s quiet for so long he suspects she’s drifted off to sleep.

“If you will keep me with you, you can call me Ulal,” she whispers.

“That’s a very beautiful name,” he says. “Ulal.”

Eventually, Ulal’s fingers slacken. Her breaths even out.

He’s told her more about himself than he’s told anyone in years. Adrift too long to recognize his own loneliness, she’s pulled him into an orbit he can’t break. Not when she needs him, not when he needs her. It was why he’d sold _The Never-Ending Sacrifice._ He doesn’t want the same ending, the same ache, the same staggering emptiness that came when he ran away from the people he loved to save his own skin.

He wonders if Miles got his letter. If he understood what Julian was trying to say. Maybe not. Maybe Keiko and Miles think he’s dead. Or Kira. Does she miss playing springball with him? Their breakfasts? Or...Elim. He tries and fails not to think about Elim Garak. Do they think he’s in hiding? Or, as he’d been so close to doing, do they think he’s abandoned everything for a deep cover operation?

He was a fool five years ago. He should have known that it was never his accomplishments or his kind colleagues or anything _good_ about him which had convinced Starfleet to allow him to stay. It was Section 31. Always Section 31. A potential asset. A man, in Garak’s terms, who could tell the same lie twice. A million times. Lie to Starfleet, lie to Section 31, lie to the best interrogator the Obsidian Order ever had.

He didn’t want to be a fool the second time around.

He looks over to the hand resting on his arm. He wants a third option. God, he wants a third option.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _mor’vatsi_ \- orphan  
>  _s'sava_ \- an honorific
> 
> Thank you to everyone who has liked and commented! It's very appreciated.


	5. six and a half months earlier

_six and a half months earlier_

* * *

“This is all that’s left?” Garak asks.

Datapadd after datapadd lies across Julian’s old dining table, full of nothing but medical research. The shelves are just as Garak remembers, save the missing stuffed toy and all of Julian’s books. His computer console nearby flickers with error code after error code while Kira stands over it and glowers.

“He must have set all his personal files to be corrupted,” Kira says. She slaps the console with the heel of her hand. “Damn! Just like he planned to send those messages out.”

Garak admits it’s possible, but it’s just as likely that someone else corrupted the files. He gestures to the console to indicate he wants to take a look, and thankfully, she moves out of his way without a fuss. She starts pacing up and down the room. Her mouth moves like she’s muttering to herself, but he can’t catch the words.

“You said you looked through his messages after you received his resignation from Starfleet,” Garak frowns. “That means whatever destroyed these files — quite thoroughly, I might add — did so after Doctor Bashir’s resignation became known to Starfleet.”

“How long after?” Kira asks, slowing her pacing.

Garak navigates through the corrupted files. “Within the last two weeks, obviously. But it appears this happened about …three hours after the resignation was sent.”

He turns off the console. There are no more secrets he can pry out of it.

“Starfleet should have a backup of the logs, but if he’s resigned, I’m no longer his commanding officer. I would need to talk to Admiral Ross to see what I can request. I don’t know what sort of jurisdiction I have here,” Kira replies.

“I see,” says Garak.

He wanders over to the bedroom. Kira watches him from the other room, no longer pacing — just standing with her arms crossed and a scowl etched on her face.

The bed is made. When he checks the closet, all of Julian’s most loved and most heinous outfits are still there. Fluorescent shirt, paisley top, triangle patterned trousers. His few nicer things are missing: a dark teal shirt made of Andorian wool, a tunic of cream linen, and the blue silk pajamas. All made by Garak. Well, if someone is looking for Julian Bashir, being well dressed is one sort of disguise.

The room may no longer smell like Julian and the man himself may be anywhere in the galaxy, but he’s everywhere. Haunts everything. Moves through the room where the carpet’s more worn. Sits at the dining chair closest to the replicator where the table is scratched from the persistent scrape of plates. Rests on the couch with a book where the cushions are sunken.

It’s an exquisite sort of agony. Everywhere, proof Julian lived. Everywhere, the inescapable conclusion of him being _gone._

He’d never wanted to come back here. The airlock. _These are for you._ Chocolates, a wistful smile. _I’m sure we’ll see each other again._ A wavering mouth, eyes over-bright and pained. Arm in elbow on the Promenade. Their empty table at the replimat. The infirmary. What was once Garak’s shop. His old quarters, where Julian had not just saved his life, but made it possible for him to live it.

“Chocolates,” says Garak. He’d left chocolates in the panel above the replicator.

“What?” Kira asks. She looks up from a padd she picked up sometime while Garak wandered the bedroom.

“Colonel, can we access my old quarters?”

“I’ll ask Major Teka to get us access, but maybe we should have lunch in the meantime,” says Kira.

Garak gives her a curt nod. She comms her first officer to arrange the visit to Garak’s old quarters.

“Quark’s, please,” he says, when he and Kira leave Julian’s quarters.

If she’s surprised by his request, she keeps it behind her expression of concern.

They enter Quark’s through the second level to avoid the bustle on the Promenade. If it avoids his old shop and Julian’s infirmary, all the better. There’s only so much memory Garak can take, and he’s already drowning in seven years worth of them.

“I heard you were back on the station,” Quark says, waltzing up to their table. Below, a single game of dabo clinks and clatters amongst the low murmur of the lunchtime crowd. “I almost didn’t believe it. Are you here to track down Doctor Bashir?”

“Garak’s here to pack up his shop,” Kira interjects before Garak can come up with a lie.

Pack up his shop? Surely, she meant to pick up whatever was put in storage upon his departure.

“Let me guess, are you going to lift its status as a _storage space?"_ Quark says. “And you’re going to let me start my massage parlor?”

“Ha! As if,” Kira replies. Garak shoots Kira a questioning look. “Your shop is just the way you left it. I should have mentioned that when you contacted me.”

“That’s a prime location,” Garak says. “Surely, you didn’t leave it as storage space for three years?”

“It was Doctor Bashir. He bought the rent on it before I could,” Quark grumbles.

Only the sheer assault of memory from being on the station and an entire lifetime of training keeps Garak’s expression schooled. But it’s like a beam of light shone on him, and he’s the light scattered everywhere. He wishes he could stop hemorrhaging.

“And I didn’t want Quark’s grubby hands on it,” says Kira.

Quark huffs. “Well, are you two going to order anything or not?”

“A red leaf tea, please,” says Garak, far more lightheaded than he was a minute earlier. “And some hasperat. You can’t get any decent hasperat on Cardassia.”

“I wonder why,” Kira says dryly. Then, to Quark, “A raktajino and an argendi sandwich on mapa bread.”

“Coming right up,” scowls Quark. He walks a few steps, then calls back, “You know, Garak, the last time the doctor was here, he wanted a glass of _civit_.”

Exquisite agony. Closing his eyes, Garak exhales heavily through his nose.

“That was the night before he left,” Kira says softly. “I was there. He was so strange.”

“What do you remember?”

“He turned to me and said what he really wanted was a taste of _civit,_ ” Kira says. “And Quark told me what it was — some very highbrow Cardassian liquor?”

“Yes, it’s quite rare and quite exquisite. Only the most prestigious citizens of the old Union could say they’d ever had a taste of it.”

“And you gave some to Julian, I’m assuming?” Kira asks.

“Once,” says Garak.

He’d shared a glass of _civit_ with Julian the evening the news broke about the Romulans joining the war. Julian had come to him late at night, silent and shaking in the soft wool shirt Garak had made him and a pair of matching trousers. As if he could not be anymore resplendent in teal the color of terafa stones, Julian had pushed up the sleeves of the jumper to reveal an obscene expanse of smooth brown skin. The heady rush of soap and musky human pheromones had sent a shiver down Garak’s spine. He could never match the scent.

Not everything reminds one of something else.

They’d sat on the sofa under the porthole, through which Ra’ajev’s eye was reduced to a pinprick of light. He’d poured the _civit_ , Julian tense and lost in some dark, churning thoughts. He didn’t want to be alone. And Garak didn’t want to be alone either.

“What is this?” Julian had asked.

“ _Civit_ ,” he said. “Mila sent it when I told her Tain died. The first time.”

Julian had lifted the glass to his lips, only to grimace before ever touching the amber liquid.

“God, what _is_ this?”

“It smells stronger than it tastes. Let it warm in your hand,” he’d said, holding his own glass in his palm before taking a measured sip.

The acrid smell always reminded him of those evenings as a boy, pouring out amber liquid for Uncle Enabran’s guests, but the smooth bite of liquor reminds him of sitting in Tain’s office after the completion of an assignment. Garak had wondered if Julian would always think of him when he tasted it.

“It’s crisp,” Julian had said with an appreciative hum. “Almost like whiskey, but not quite close enough for a direct comparison.”

“Do you want to talk about Sloan?” Garak asked once the silence had stretched long enough and the alcohol was half-gone from both their glasses.

“Do you want to talk about Senator Vreenak?” Julian countered.

“I’ll talk about whatever you want,” Garak said, a little tiredly. “You’re the one who showed up on my doorstep.”

“He wants me to work for them because of my _augmentations_ ,” said Julian, downing the last of his drink.

Garak had topped off their glasses.

“Whatever Section 31 wants, they won’t make you into an operative like Sloan, or like—”

“You,” said Julian.

Garak smiles with his best customer service smile.

“My dear, they take men like us young and train us young. They train us to go after secrets like a riding hound goes after the scent of a vole. They rear us on nothing but pure patriotism, until we love nothing but service of country,” said Garak. “They will make you complicit in what they do, but they will never take a man like you and make you like Sloan…like me. They’re simply too late to mold you, and I suspect you would have been too stubborn anyways.”

Julian had exhaled, a weight shrugging off his shoulders. He’d smiled back at Garak, small and appreciative, in a way that had pulled on something deep in Garak’s chest. Something that had rooted and bloomed in him, that grew in Julian’s presence, that he had no words with which to describe it.

“Like you and Sisko made me complicit in what you did?” he’d asked.

Garak sighed. “Just so, my dear.”

“What did you tell Sisko?”

“It was his initial idea, I just executed it _properly._ Elegantly, if I may boast. He wasn’t particularly happy with me, but even he saw it for the bargain it was.”

“A bargain?”

“A small price to pay. One Romulan senator and his guilty conscience, for all those lives. Surely your computations have reached the same conclusion.”

“And what of your conscience? How do you live with it?” asked Julian. He didn’t sound accusatory. He had been asking for advice.

“How do you live with the patients you’ve lost?” Garak said, his smile slanting.

“I don’t like the implication that our professions are similar,” Julian replied.

“Different goals and guiding philosophies, and yet, here we are. When all other options exhaust themselves, we make the call on who lives and who dies and how,” said Garak. “And neither of us likes the idea of someone else making those sorts of calls. For what it’s worth, your profession is far more noble.”

Julian exhaled sharply.

Garak continued at the darkened expression in Julian’s eyes, “With your passionate compassion and your radical reverence for life, you’re also a nobler man.”

“I’ve seen what you’re capable of, noble and ignoble,” said Julian. “I think I’ll hope on this side of the grave.”

“And if I recall correctly, ‘ _No poem or play or song/ Can fully right a wrong/ Inflicted and endured_.” Garak replied.

“But a wrong inflicted and endured can be regretted. It can be forgiven,” said Julian, so heart-achingly earnest Garak had to close his eyes. He did regret them. All of them. Julian continued, “You know, I think you were a better operative than Sloan.”

“And why is that?” said Garak.

“Because I think it’s easy, when required to do horrible things, to lose your empathy. It’s harder to live with a guilty conscience,” said Julian.

“You must think me a monster,” Garak said. “To feel and still do what I do.”

“You’re not,” Julian said.

“I very much doubt that, my dear Doctor.”

Julian gave a small smile.

“In a some old Terran languages, the word monster referred to creatures of many animal origins. Half one thing, and half another. A griffin — half horse, half giant eagle — was a monster. Frankenstein’s creation was a monster. Something constructed. The familiar taken apart and remade,” Julian said. He’d looked out the porthole, searching the inky void outside, sipping at the pungent _civit_ in his glass with a little crease between his brows. “If you’re a monster, I am too. And if that is true, then I don’t think a monster is such a terrible thing to be.”

_I don’t think a monster is such a terrible thing to be._

The clack of his and Kira’s mugs on the table brings him sharply, painfully, out of the memory. In all the parts of him that still yield, Garak aches. Pain as fresh as the day it had been administered. Pain, circular, repeating, never-ending. Such is the nature of memory. Such is the nature of pain.

Their sandwiches slide beside the mugs.

“Thanks, Quark,” says Kira, taking a deep drag of her coffee.

Her eyes flutter closed in bliss.

“Yes, thank you,” says Garak.

He glares at Quark until he scuttles back down the stairs.

“Will I really have to pack my shop up now?” says Garak, sipping the red leaf tea.

He grimaces. Replicated. Either he’s been on Cardassia long enough to tell what the real thing is again or Chief O’Brien’s absence has taken a toll on the replicator pattern drift.

“I can have one of the officers do it,” Kira shrugs.

“If they can at least put things in boxes, I’ll sort out the rest,” Garak says.

The hasperat, thankfully, is freshly made. Spice bursts on his tongue, warm. How many lunches had he shared with Julian where he’d ordered this? And how many lunches had he spent alone, under the hateful stares of Bajorans?

“At the bar, the night before Julian left, he asked Quark who the love of his life was,” Kira says, after chewing through half of her sandwich. “It was such a strange question. If he was just drunk and feeling nostalgic, I would have understood, but he really wanted to know Quark’s answer.”

“Which was?” Garak frowns.

“Dax,” Kira says, pausing to devour the rest of her food. “And the thing was, he looked so _triumphant._ Not happy. But like he’d won something. But you know, I believed him when he talked about loving someone so much that it rearranges you at a sub-atomic level. Loving someone enough to betray yourself for them. Loving someone in a way that pulls you across light-years. And I believed him when he said it’s hard to believe you’re in the right place when the person you loved and shared the station with is gone.”

“Doctor Bashir has always been a romantic,” Garak says. He tries not to think about how if anyone was sub-atomically rearranged, it was him, and if anyone pulls him across the light-years — obvious by his presence on this station, chasing a ghost that doesn’t want to be found — it’s Julian. “Have you contacted Ezri Dax about this?”

“I sent her a message, but her vessel is out on an exploratory mission in the Gamma Quadrant, it probably hasn’t reached her yet,” says Kira. “But you see, Garak, I talked to Ezri after she left Julian. Julian didn’t love her like that. He had five transfer options that would have let Ezri and him stay together while she switched to a command track. He didn’t want a life with her. It had to be something else. Someone else.”

 _It could have been you, Garak,_ a voice much like Julian’s taunts. _No_. No, he’s resigned himself of Julian. Julian had three years. Three years where Section 31 and Starfleet no longer breathed down their necks. He could have sent a letter. If he ever cared, if he ever felt anything, he could have said it. The pain circles back, and Garak presses for the calm bottom of the river. He lets the current rush over him and take the thought away.

“Perhaps the genetically engineered woman? Sarina?” Garak says.

“No, I don’t think it was her. She never came back to the station,” says Kira. “I can’t believe we’re gossiping about Julian’s love life when he might be dead for all we know.”

 _You, Garak,_ says Julian’s ghost.

“I don’t think he’s dead. And the night at the bar was the night before he left. He recorded those messages soon after, if the timestamps are to be believed. Whatever he said then is intimately connected to why Doctor Bashir left and, hopefully, where he decided to go,” says Garak.

“Garak, what happened to you and Julian? Why have you been out of contact since you left the station?” Kira asks. “You two were almost inseparable for years.”

He doesn’t know how to tell her that every moment of intimacy held a fracture. With every traded secret, they paid it back by pulling away. Weekly lunch became monthly. Lunch became quick tea-times. Long arguments sparking with electricity became quiet discussions. He doesn’t know how to tell Kira he accepted the distance for Julian’s own safety. He can’t bear for her to look at him and see him laid bare. All his scales flayed open, unbearably naked and raw.

“We drifted apart, Colonel,” say Garak. Funny that out of all his occupations, retail work trained him to hide his feelings better than anything that came before or after. “War changes things. It changed Doctor Bashir.”

“You and Julian,” she says, shaking her head. “Always lying and telling the truth, all at the same time.”

She lets him finish his tepid hasperat in peace, and they take a second round of tea to talk about Hebitian scriptures. The way her eyes light up softens some of the sting.

* * *

The chocolates are gone. Sad, since he’d been looking forward to eating them the whole trip over.

“Kira, who packed up my quarters?”

“Julian did,” she says. “Why?”

“Because he took my chocolates,” says Garak.

His disappointment changes into curiosity as Garak feels around the compartment. He finds a folded piece of paper near the back and unfolding the page, he finds it printed with Standard text. It’s been torn out of a book, a line underlined.

_My ghosts come striding into their spring stations._

“What’s that?” Kira gawks.

He lets the memory come to the surface; an afternoon spent reading between clients.

“Do you have a personal favorite?” Garak had asked, his fingertips brushing over Julian’s as the doctor handed him a paper book.

 _“Glanmore Sonnets,”_ Julian said, with a smile that rivaled a Cardassian sun. The book smelled like old paper, oxidizing bookbinding glue, and Julian’s skin. Crisp and subtly musky. A scent he could hardly describe but would know anywhere.

“And why’s that?”

“Oh, I can’t possibly give away all my secrets,” he’d grinned, green eyes dancing.

He’d returned the copy, apparently a gift from Chief O’Brien, shortly after they had evacuated Deep Space 9. In the Defiant’s close quarters, they’d allowed themselves only an evening tea of impossibly restrained intimacy, schedules permitting. No arguments, no politics, no brush of a hand. Like resisting the pull of gravity. He’d catch Julian’s hands trembling from holding back.

“What is it?” Kira asks.

“A Terran poem,” he says.

“Do you know what it says?”

“ _And in that dream I dreamt—how like you this?—/ Our first night years ago in that hotel/ When you came with your deliberate kiss/ To raise us towards the lovely and painful/ Covenants of flesh; our separateness;/ The respite in our dewy dreaming faces._ ”

“That’s...” Kira frowns.

“Melodramatic?”

“I was going to say horny.”

“Hmm,” Garak says.

Julian’s favorite indeed. They’d talked about _Glanmore Sonnets_ the last time they’d shared tea on the station. Before he’d left with Damar and Kira. A night shift at the infirmary of all places, their mugs leaving ring-marks on the console. Julian’s hair was over-long and over-combed like he was trying too hard to keep himself together, chewing his cheek more often than usual, tugging at his uniform sleeves. He can scarcely recall the day, his own mind rattling against a dark and shrinking closet.

“I keep thinking about the ninth sonnet. He took his family to Glanmore to escape sectarian violence in Belfast,” Julian had said, with that ever-present distant look in his eyes. Haunted. “He was asking what the role of an artist was while his countrymen died. ‘What is my apology for poetry?’”

“There’s always a need for poetry,” Garak had replied. “For what will us countrymen read while we are fighting?”

“And when the fighting’s done, will you still be a soldier, or a poet?” Julian asked, flicking his tired amber-green eyes to Garak.

He took time, the rarest of luxuries, to commit Julian’s face to memory, drawing over the new lines in his brow, the deepened ones around his mouth. He memorized the dark shadows under his eyes and the stubborn light in them. The colors of a desert shot with green.

“If I’m alive, my dear,” Garak said, “I suppose someone will have to plough the opened ground.”

The corner of Julian’s eyes crinkled and his mouth twitched upward. He hid his smile behind a sip of Tarkalean tea.

“I’d like to see that,” Julian said. “You, gardening. Your hands in the dirt under a hot sun.”

“And in this resplendent fantasy, my dear, are you still a soldier?”

Working his jaw like he were chewing through an elaborate puzzle or a strong feeling, he stared at Garak. Julian’s eyes burned. Their heat crawled over Garak, like sinking into sun-soaked sand, like a creeping plasma burn, like pain seeping in after the numb shock of a fist to the gut. His neck warmed. By the quick dilation of Julian’s pupils he knew blood stained his scales blue.

Garak, in all his tortured _dasseks_ , had never dreamed of such cruelty. His hand twitched around the mug. He fought the desperate urge to knock it from the console and grab Julian by the front of his uniform, uncaring for the shattered mug or the dark stain at their feet.

Over and over in his head, he smashed the mug. He smashed it and captured those warm, red, softly bowed lips and never tasted another thing but that again, never smelled anything but heady salt-musk touched with nyawood, never felt anything but fevered brown skin, velvet as the petal of an orchid under his cold, aching scales. Damn the war. Damn Cardassia. Damn the consequences.

Julian’s gaze dragged down to rest on Garak’s hand, gripped so hard around the mug that veins and tendons alike stood out below his strained knuckles.

“‘My dear soldier’ doesn’t quite sound as nice,” Julian said, too hoarse.

He climbed out of the fantasy, cup unscathed, lips untouched.

“No, it doesn’t,” Garak replied. “Should I ever glimpse you in a such a garden, it’ll be as a doctor.”

“You seem sure of that,” Julian said.

Garak was sure of nothing but the danger of moving the hand wrapped around cooling ceramic.

“We can never be sure of anything. Uncertain times,” he said tightly.

Garak shakes off the memory and folds the page back up. It doesn’t carry any scent but that of old paper, but it doesn’t mean he doesn’t smell Julian’s skin like he’s here beside him. He tucks it into his tunic. It’s precious. It’s all he has. Evidence that he wasn’t forgotten. A little climbing-vine of hope.

“Did…did _Julian_ leave that for you?” Kira asks.

How strange it is to be haunted by someone who is still alive. In this room, he remembers _civit_ and unending agony. _No one deserves this._ Someone else lives here now. _I forgive you, for whatever it is you did._ The furniture has been replaced entirely. Ziyal’s drawings are in his home on Cardassia.

“I suppose he must have. When he left it, I don’t know,” says Garak. “Maybe the day he left, maybe the day he packed up my quarters.”

“Why?”

Why, indeed? _Why didn’t you write me, my dear?_

“That, Colonel, I cannot say,” says Garak. “Perhaps this was a final goodbye.”

“Do you think he’s gone for good?” Kira says. “Do you think we can find him?”

Garak sighs.

“Kira,” he says, leveling his gaze to her distraught face. “I am beginning to suspect the doctor left of his own accord for his own devices. I suggest we notify his family and report him missing. It’s all we can do.”

He suspects much more than that. He suspects he knows who Julian’s ghost could be, or at least who they work for.

“Garak...”

“There are things beyond both of our abilities to control going on here,” he says, begging her to understand what he can’t tell her. “I have to go back to Cardassia, Colonel. I suggest you light a flame for Julian Bashir in your temple.”

“And you, Garak?” she asks. “What will you do?”

He sighs, frayed and exhausted.

“Do you remember Lakarian City, Colonel?” he says. Frayed and exhausted and tired of pretending that being here with Julian missing isn’t the worst sort of agony.

“As if I could forget,” she says.

“Don’t forget,” he says.

He wonders when a world without Julian Bashir weighed equal with two million lost Cardassian lives. He wonders what he’d do for another few minutes of barely restrained intimacy.

But he knows.

He’s going to find him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And so we discover why Julian wanted a glass of civit. 
> 
> _civit_ is a Cardassian liquor courtesy of [AlphaCygni](https://archiveofourown.org/users/AlphaCygni/pseuds/AlphaCygni)
> 
>  _"No poem or play or song/ Can fully right a wrong/ Inflicted and endured"_ is an excerpt from Seamus Heaney's "The Cure at Troy"
> 
> Garak quotes the tenth sonnet in Glanmore Sonnets.


	6. this strange loneliness

> This evening the cuckoo and the corncrake
> 
> (So much, too much) consorted at twilight.
> 
> It was all crepuscular and iambic.
> 
> Out on the field a baby rabbit
> 
> Took his bearings, and I knew the deer
> 
> (I’ve seen them too from the window of the house,
> 
> Like connoisseurs, inquisitive of air)
> 
> Were careful under larch and May-green spruce.
> 
> I had said earlier, ‘I won’t relapse
> 
> From this strange loneliness I’ve brought us to.
> 
> Dorothy and William—’ She interrupts:
> 
> ‘You’re not going to compare us two...?’
> 
> Outside a rustling and twig-combing breeze
> 
> Refreshes and relents. Is cadences.
> 
> _-_ — _Glanmore Sonnets III, Seamus Heaney_

Sunlight, pale and wavering, peeks into Julian’s eyes. He blinks quickly against the assault. An unfamiliar ceiling, painted desert green, comes into focus. Pink-gray light slants over him, warms his face, the right side of his neck, his hand slung over his chest. Groaning softly, he shifts onto his side. His back aches from the stiff floor-mat and from, he suspects, not moving at all in the night.

Through a high window set into a smooth sand-colored wall, the sky is clear and mauve as the famed bet’to root of Indar Province. He’s lying on a mat on the floor, a warm blanket draped over him. Warm. Sunlight. The wind isn’t howling against the rickety metal walls of the guard’s station. To his left, on a cot above him, a Cardassian girl with choppy, chin-length hair sleeps. Sixteen breaths per minute. She sleeps deeply.

Cardassia. Indar Province. The boy who died. Ulal Ghadar. Doctor Nekot, letting them stay in her house. Slowly, as the sleepy fog of his brain clears, he remembers walking to the clay-stone house on the northmost edge of town with Nekot and Ghadar. It had been dark; their path lit only by the moons.

Julian gets up as quietly as he can and creeps into the main room. Sitting at a little round table under the window in a long black housecoat, Doctor Nekot sips a strong, fragrant tea.

“Did your charge sleep through the night?” she asks.

Through the window behind her, the wavering morning sun paints the highlands pink. A chronometer set on the wall reads 0700 hours. Nekot would usually already be in for her shift, and Julian leaving at the end of his. He’s not yet sure living _here —_ in Nekot’s little house made of hard clay, probably hundreds of years old if the floor under his feet is really _wood_ under the braided dune-grass rugs — is entirely real.

“I think so,” Julian says. His voice rasps.

“Hm, good,” she replies, shifting her long, steel-gray hair, tied every few centimeters with a red thread, over her shoulder. “I was worried about her. Do you want a cup? The pot is in the kitchen.”

“Thanks,” he says. He passes her table to the little galley kitchen on the back of the house. The pot sits on a tea towel on the steel counter, steaming happily from the spout. He grabs a mug, crackled red porcelain, from the shelf above the sink and pours. “I was worried too.”

“More nightmares for you?” she asks, gesturing with her hand for Julian to join her.

“No,” says Julian. He crosses the room in a few long strides and settles in the chair across her, the heat of the cup sinking into his hands. She looks mild. Pensive, even. He’s an intruder on this softer version of Nekot. “I... I don’t know how to thank you.”

“You can thank me by digging up the weeds in the bed under the kitchen window,” she says. “Or the dukaff and bet’to will never grow come spring.”

“I’m going to be a gardening embarrassment,” Julian groans. “I killed so many plants, you have _no_ idea.”

Nekot sips her tea and waves her hand dismissively.

“Nonsense. Ghadar can show you,” she says. “The girl’s grown up here, she’s been weeding bet’to beds since she could crawl.”

A smile twitches at the corner of his lips.

“Are there any books she can read?” he says. “Two of mine probably aren’t suitable unless you think I should teach her Federation Standard. And the third...well, I’m not sure if Iloja is...educational...at her age?”

Nekot laughs softly behind her cup. It’s a hoarse, barking laugh, even at a morning volume while Ik’kari and Ulal sleep.

“ _Thoughts on a Hostile Cosmos_ might have been too radical for the former Union, but perhaps it’s not such a terrible thing to teach a child to think for herself,” says Nekot.

“No, I don’t think it is,” says Julian.

“And the cosmos is, after all, a hostile place,” she says. “How many planets has your Federation completely terraformed, and yet, our council begs for just industrial replicators or a single-city climate stabilizer with no avail.”

“I know.”

“Julian, you know important people, surely you could _say_ something.”

“I’m in exile here, Nekot. It’s not my Federation,” he hisses.

The tea is cool enough for him to take a tentative sip. It’s some sort of black tea — deep tannins and caffeine coat his tongue — but spiced and citrusy. As he inhales the steam, the persistent dry, burning feeling in his nostrils abates.

“That doesn’t mean your work is done,” she says. Her dark eyes, more black than brown, pierce through him.

“You think I can annoy the Federation into stabilizing the Cardassian climate and proving reconstruction aid?” he says.

“I can’t think of anyone more annoying,” she says, not unkindly. “You know, I might have some of Iloja’s older journals, published back when he was a hobby naturalist. It might give you some more educational material _and_ keep you from killing my plants. Just...save _Meditations on Gravitational Anomalies_ for when she’s older. I’m too old to deal with those questions from _either_ of you.”

Julian laughs into his tea, nearly spilling it onto his lap.

“Don’t worry. I know those poems from his stay with Skon and T’Rama are...racy.”

“ _Do_ you?” she says, narrowing her eyes. “Well, after years of academic study, no one has been able to identify Iloja’s lover.”

“Huh,” says Julian. “I wonder if Ezri knows.”

“Who?” Nekot asks, tilting her head curiously.

“Oh, a friend of mine. A joined Trill.”

“The symbiotic species?”

“Yes. Ezri Dax. Ezri’s previous host Jadzia told me one of Dax’s earlier hosts, Tobin, met Iloja on Vulcan. I bet if I asked her...”

Julian deflates. Of course he can’t ask her. Call up his ex-girlfriend in the Gamma Quadrant after being on the run with no explanation for months, only to ask if she knew who Iloja of Prim’s lover was?

He sighs.

“Maybe you’ll figure it out yourself,” Nekot says, “or, maybe you’ll get a chance to ask her after all. In time.”

He can only hope. Julian hadn’t planned out how long he would hide. Truthfully, he’d assumed someone would have caught up with him by now and dragged him back to the Federation, but here he is, drinking tea in the tendrils of morning light on a clear day in Indar Province. Alive and whole in the new world.

“I’ll stick to the other serializations and the journals, if you still have them, instead of trying to decipher what he means by ‘ _the ragged claws of the preThok,_ ’” Julian says, trying to smile.

“Maybe his thoughts on exile will help you in your own,” she offers.

Nekot shifts her thick housecoat tighter over the long wool caftan. Obliquely, Julian wonders how she could possibly be cold when this is the warmest he’s been in months. Then the still-asleep part of his brain pokes its head up and reminds him twenty centigrade _is_ cold for a Cardassian, particularly an unmoving one.

“Well,” says Julian, draining his tea, “he wouldn’t be the first Cardassian in exile to do so.”

Outside, the sandy shape of a northern regnar skitters through the scrub grass under the window, leaving the shade of the house to bask on the rocks in the sun. The hiss of a door startles him from his inspection of the sunning lizard.

Tucked tightly in Julian’s jacket, Ulal rubs sleep from her eyes. She takes in the low sofa and tea-table in the middle of the room, the little glowing heater set into the far wall, and Julian and Nekot at the table under the large window. A little in awe, and very unsure.

“Good morning, Nekot _s’sava_ and Julian, _s’sava,_ ” she says softly, warily.

The corners of Nekot’s eyes crinkle with a smile.

“Breakfast, _lis’sea_?” says Nekot. The girl bows. Nekot gives up both her chair and her large housecoat to Ulal. Her head looks very small amongst all the layers. “With the sun out, we should warm up quickly. Julian, can you get her some ration bars? I need to dress for my shift.”

“Of course,” he says, flurrying to action.

“And make her red-leaf tea, not the black-leaf,” she barks, already leaving for her bedroom. “I will see you both tonight to show you what needs to be done around the house while I’m away.”

“Of course, _s’sava_ ,” Julian says, digging through a metal container on the kitchen counter full of ration bars. While he assembles something of a breakfast — fresh red-leaf brewed on the hot plate, a breakfast ration, and a little pinch of sugar for the grainy, wet mush the ration bar turns into when combined with hot water — he chatters.

“Doctor Nekot will be leaving tomorrow for Indari’or. She’s meeting with the other heads of hospital to present what’s going on with disease and such in our region and hopefully she’ll be able to argue for more aid. She should be back in a few days time.”

Since her mush doesn’t look half bad, he makes a bowl of porridge for himself. Ordinarily, he’d eat the bar dry over breakfast with Setek, but Nekot has a real water reclamator and he’s feeling a little indulgent. When the sun is out in Indar, or so people say.

“I was thinking we could see her off for her skimmer at the port?” Julian asks. Ulal nods as he sets her tea and bowl of steaming mush in front of her. She digs in greedily, sighing as the food warms her. “I’ll have a day shift in research with Doctor Enar after we see Doctor Nekot off tomorrow morning. Would you like to come with me and read in the lab or would you like to do something on your own?”

“On my own?”

“Well,” Julian says. The mush is terrible. Terrible, but far more filling as a hot paste than as a dry bar. “What did you usually do when...when you were with Kalor? What did your days look like? Was there anyone in the camp that taught kids or was there work you did?”

She sets down her spoon and stares into her bowl.

“I wasn’t on my own, _s’sava_ ,” she says quietly, barely above a whisper. “I had Elim. We helped the elders get their rations and water, odd things here and there.”

Her mouth twitches. She takes a few strained breaths, before taking a sip of tea to wash down the porridge. Her face is a mask. Her whole family, killed. Her last friend, dead. She wasn’t on her own before. Now she is.

“Do you want to do that tomorrow, or would you like to try something different? You could stay here.”

But she’s lost. She doesn’t answer. She doesn’t look him in the eye, and it’s as if he no longer exists. She eats in unresponsive silence. Drinks without looking at him. Sarina. He thinks of Sarina. A lively, generous heart trapped in a cage her whole life. _There are no other Augments like you._

“You know when my shift ends, Julian,” says Doctor Nekot, striding out in her long traveling coat, hair done up in its usual severe coif, and her respirator and headscarf dangling from her hand. “And Ghadar, I told him you would show him how to weed the — Ghadar? _Lis’sea_?”

At the girl’s lack of responsiveness, Nekot hurries over and presses her fingers to Ulal’s temple.

“Is she ill?”

“Shock response,” Julian rasps. “I reminded her about Kalor, she’s still processing that trauma. I’ll try to take her out to the garden when it’s warmer but —”

“Does she need a sedative? A stimulant? I can get my scanner.”

“No, no,” Julian says, quickly steadying Nekot’s arm. “She’ll be alright, she just needs time to get used to this. Her life has been upheaved very suddenly, and not for the first time. We all have a lot to get used to.”

Nekot hold his stare until she relents. Pulling her hand back, she exhales and straightens into the director of the fifth sector’s field hospital.

“You’ll let me know if you or her need anything?”

“Yes, promise,” he says.

“Do you need _anything_?” she says, picking up the medical bag by the door.

“I think the hospital needs you more than we do,” Julian says. “Who knows what Doctor Enar has gotten up to in your absence?”

Now _that_ gets her out of the door.

“Now,” he says to Ulal, who is watching the regnars bask in the now-yellow morning light. “Would you like to sonic the dishes clean or dry them?”

* * *

They do a decent job of figuring out how to work the sonics in the kitchen after a lot of snooping and prodding on Julian’s part. Ulal mostly watches. He considers it a little victory when she takes over the cleaning for him, leaving him to put all the plates back up on the shelves above. She’s small enough that she doesn’t have to hunch painfully over the sink and he’s tall enough to reach the taller shelves with ease. It works well.

When he catches her itching dry scales behind her ears, he shoos her into the washroom for a sonic shower. He shows her how to run her clothes through the old sonic laundry press in there, and when she comes out, scrubbed clean and her gray dress crisp under Nekot’s housecoat, he realizes that someone — probably him — needs to do something about her hair. And he doesn’t have the slightest clue what to do.

“Doctor Nekot,” he comms on his hospital communicator. “Doctor Nekot from Doctor Bashir!”

Ulal just stands by the heater in the main room, her shoulder length hair standing almost completely on end like some sort of tangled nest of tribbles. She’s humming softly to herself.

“ _Julian? What is it? What’s wrong?”_ Nekot’s panicked voice comes in.

“I uh...uh, it’s her _hair,_ ” Julian says.

“ _Her hair.”_

“She took a shower, and um...”

There’s a heavy, relieved, and choked laugh of a sound on the other end of the line.

“ _It’s a mess isn’t it?”_ she says. “ _Well, I’m glad I was only in the middle of telling Doctor Enar how_ wrong _she is on the merits of_ Thoughts on a Hostile Cosmos.”

“Ah, well, I’m ah, glad it wasn’t a surgery or anything but...is there anything that can be done about it?”

“ _Yes,”_ Nekot sighs. _“Go to the washroom.”_

“Right, right,” Julian says, scrambling off the sofa and running to the fresher between Ulal’s room and Nekot’s room. The lights flicker back on. “Ok, I’m there.”

_“Hair brush,”_ she says.

He finds something that _might_ be a hairbrush on the counter, if all the bristles were like a bunch of combs taped together.

“Uh, this brown thing? With the teeth?”

“ _With the teeth?”_ Nekot swears in Kardasi, and over the whine of the UT he hears something about something cursed something bastard. “ _Those are riding hound tail bristles! Do you have_ any _idea how expensive that thing is?”_

“Uh, no?” Julian says. It comes out a little squeaky.

“ _There’s a bottle of oil in the cabinet,”_ she says.

“Ok, ok,” he says, flushed and flustered. “Um, there’s _anti-aging—”_

“ _Julian_!” Nekot barks so loudly he nearly drops the communicator.

“Sorry! Oh, I think I found it. Parlak’s hair oil?”

_“Yes, now you’ll have to put it in your hands and untangle the worst knots at the end, then work your way up. Don’t yank, don’t pull. Make sure you work it into her scalp or she’ll get an itch and she’ll be shedding for weeks.”_

“Thanks. How do you live with the sonics when it does _that_?” Julian asks.

“ _Next time, wash her hair with water over the sink_ ,” she says. “ _Don’t let her stick it under the sonic_.”

“Thanks, Nekot,” he says.

“ _I’ll see you later, Doctor Bashir_ ,” she says, groused, and the comm connection cuts out.

He grabs the brush and hair oil, and steels himself for the job at hand.

“Ulal?” he asks, sitting back down on the sofa. She shifts her head to hear him better but her eyes stay fixed on the floor. “You need your hair brushed and oiled. Do you want me to try or do you want to do it yourself?”

Her gray-brown eyes flick to the brush and oil in his hands. She hums the few final notes of her song and sits down on the floor, her back to him. The notes stick in his head and trickle through like honey, turning into a song he finds familiar. _Birds flying high, you know how I feel._ Funny, how a brain can pick out the simplest of patterns and extrapolate the complex.

Tentatively, the brush and oil bottle balanced in his lap, he touches her hair. _Sun in the sky, you know how I feel._ It’s dry, tangled, and thick. _Breeze driftin' on by, you know how I feel_. He feels around for where the worst mats are and formulates a plan of attack. He wishes he’d had some reference point for this activity. If he’d had a sister, or friends who were girls...or friends at all when he was a boy. Or if he’d ever offered to do this for any of his partners over the years.

But as it stands, Julian is thirty-seven years old, can calculate complex analytical models in his head, hit a target with perfect accuracy and precision from more than ten meters away, and he has never _ever_ untangled anyone’s hair except his own. Pure empathy will have to carry him through this.

“I’m, ah, going to do my best not to hurt you, but I’ve never done this before...not for anyone...and not for Cardassian hair,” he says.

She nods.

Okay. _Okay. You can do this._ He pours the oil out into his palms, humming along to the tune of Nina Simone churning unwittingly through his head. Desert sage — dry, spiced, warm.

It smells like Garak.

Five years ago, he’d sat down with Garak in the mess hall of the _Defiant_ during some off-shift hour. Plasma fires left the room sweltering. Garak had abandoned his jacket for the thermal shirt underneath and practically basked in the heat, a blue tinge to his cheeks. _So that’s what a healthy Cardassian complexion looks like._ The smell of him, rich and spiced and subtly floral had surrounded Julian. They’d been alone but not really _alone,_ two cups of tea and a table the only thing preventing a full collision.

While Garak’s eyes showed the strain of staring at endless lines of Cardassian code and Julian knew an eighteen hour barrage of plasma burns, broken bones, and concussions left him no better, a sense of quiet had settled between them. The moment had stretched and lingered, neither warm nor cold, neither content nor discomfited. In that moment, alive. In that moment, existing. He didn’t count Garak’s breaths. He didn’t measure the distance to the mess hall door or the space between tables or the milliliters remaining in each cup.

Quiet. In his battered heart and racing mind, quiet. He’d left his fear at the door. There and then, on a journey to Starbase 375, Julian understood something he hadn’t before. In that moment of quiet clarity, he _understood._ It was love. It had always been love. Two people sitting doing nothing. Two people holding each other’s secrets safe. Two people implicitly forgiven.

The dry, spiced scent of Garak’s hair oil. Funny, how a brain can pick out the simplest of patterns and extrapolate the complex.

_Sleep in peace when day is done, that's what I mean._

When he looks down at his hands again, he’s untangled all of the largest mats, and Ulal’s hair no longer reaches for the outer limits of Cardassia’s dry atmosphere.

“ _And this old world, is a new world and a bold world for me,”_ he sings softly.

Softly, he runs the brush through her hair. It transforms. It falls down smooth behind her ears, glossy and black as the expanse of sky outside Deep Space Nine. One of these days he’ll trim her hair properly to neaten out the uneven fall of hair on her neck. He has tomorrow and the day after. He has time. He isn’t going anywhere. No more implosions. No more sabotage. No more poison.

He grins. “There. All done.”

Ulal, almost shyly, touches her hair.

“Do you want to look in the mirror?” he asks, gathering up the comb and oil. “I need to put these back in the washroom.”

While he puts things back into Nekot’s cabinet, Ulal twists her head back and forth. She runs her hands through her hair. She feels the uneven ends. Julian wonders how much she recognizes herself. He knows when he looks up at the bearded man in the mirror in the mornings, curls falling into his eyes, his brown skin flaking on his cheeks and every so often a dry trail of blood from his nostrils into that beard, he doesn’t quite know who he’s looking at yet.

* * *

“Come on,” he says softly. “I’d like you to show me how to properly pull up the weeds in the garden.”

He helps her put on a spare respirator and trades Nekot’s nice housecoat for Julian’s uniform jacket. Both are too large, but only one will withstand kneeling about in a dusty garden. He’s also sure Nekot would not hesitate to throw him out for letting her coat get ruined. Oh, what Doctor Enar say if she knew Nekot wore thick wool housecoats and had a hairbrush of riding hound bristle and had a whole cabinet of anti-aging creams and lotions.

The array of lotions and potions are personally quite tempting. Seven months of cold, arid air have given him two complaints: more nosebleeds than he’s ever had before in his life and more wrinkles and dry skin than he wants to admit to. If the ingredients aren’t irritating to human skin, he’ll patch test some on his arm tonight.

Ulal taps his arm.

“Sorry,” he says. “I was thinking about dry skin.”

Her shoulders shake slightly in the smallest of concealed laughs.

As they step out into the mid-day light of Nekot’s back garden, a cool breeze trickles through his hair, unsettling a few curls tucked behind his ear. With the air clear enough to risk displacing the respirator, he breathes in. Dry earth and dust. A little metallic. Warm from the sun. And the scent of cold air rolling down the hills, more humid, with that inexplicable smoky tinge of winter on a mountain.

Five gray garden beds choke with bundles of creeping thorny brush. Gray-brown and spiked, it spills in cascades over the beds. Ulal weaves through the beds poking and prodding, pulling back leggy tendrils and letting them snap back into place. While she inspects, Julian takes in the view from Nekot’s hillside home.

The highlands above spread out uninterrupted by any buildings or roads. A trail carves through the grasses up the hills in a gray meandering line until it meets the yellow horizon. To the west, the town curls and coils. There’s the hospital — a dark rectangular block at the bottom of the slope with the collapsed agricultural research outpost beside it. There are the scattered houses made of the same stone and concrete as Nekot’s and others of corrugated metal. A few large tents lie on the outskirts. There’s his old guard station, once standing watch in front of the collapsed mill. From there, the main road cuts from the skimmer port to the market. Everything red-gray under the sun. It’s not a perfectly clear day, but clearer than they’ve had in weeks.

The whole plain, sloping gently from the arid highlands down to the churning Northern Sea, used to be farmland with fields of bet’to and grains as far as the eye could see. If Julian squints, the hints of fields take shape in the brown expanse. Nekot is about as prone to fanciful fabrication as Garak is to recounting the dullest, most factual version of events, so he knows this scrubby wasteland fed most of Cardassia after the Dominion bombardment, but it’s hard to believe at this stage of ecological collapse that anything can grow here. And yet, by some stubborn roots, the scrubby grasses remain and whisper. Clicks and chitters and scrapes come from animals he doesn’t yet see.

Crouching beside Ulal, he watches her calculate an approach to the monstrous tangle.

She plucks the thorny weeds out of the plastisteel garden beds with the precision of a surgeon suturing a wound, the quick force of a right hook to a jaw, the sureness of a sniper firing a phaser rifle. Her claws pierce perfectly between thorns. Never drawing blood, never hesitating. She knows where the hardest part of each plant is. She knows exactly how to twist each one out by the roots. There’s something ruthless about it. Something that makes him understand a little bit of Elim Garak, the gardener. 

She meets his eyes.

“Vest’ul,” she says, muffled by the respirator so the UT doesn’t catch it.

“The dry knife?” he replies.

She nods. Hesitantly, he tries to replicate her approach and her technique with a nearby shrub. Her hand catches him around the wrist before he can yank it out. He’d been so sure he’d caught it the right way, avoiding the sharp thorns around his tender skin, grabbing a suitably strong branch, but then she points down, into a crack in the dirt created by his motion. A little green shoot amongst the disturbed earth. Ulal takes the vine from his hand.

She twists the plant other way.

There’s a hole where the scraggly rhizomes of the vest’ul spread their white tendrils, but the green shoot remains undisturbed. There’s something ruthless about it, yes. But something tender too. Something reverent for life. Something that makes him understand a little bit of Elim Garak, the gardener. 

He laughs, and she replies with a crinkle around her eyes.

“You’re only thinning the beds,” he realizes by the time she’s guided him through three out of five beds. “Not pulling everything out.”

She pulls off her respirator and beckons him to do the same. “Again?”

“Oh, I said you’re thinning the plants, not pulling them all out,” Julian says. He tastes the dust on his tongue, but also something sweeter coming from the pile of scraggly plants lying in a heap beside them.

“They need light,” says Ulal, with her gentle-grave voice. Her sharp eyes crackle with excitement. “But the dry knife protects the shoots from the winter wind. When spring comes and the wind blows off the sea instead of down the hills, you don’t need the thorns anymore. The plants are strong enough to stand on their own.”

“That’s very — ” Julian frowns, digging through his brain for the right words.

“Poetic?” Ulal supplies.

“Yes,” he laughs. “Poetic.”

“We won’t have this much longer,” she says, evening out the soil around a tender sprout.

She’s right. Watching her here, kneeling amongst the wicked thorns, he knows she’s right. If the epidemiological models he worked on with Doctor Enar are allowed to reach their conclusion, Indar has less than three years before population collapse. And after, not even the regnars skittering in the sand, or the birds, or the crawling bugs under his boots, or the scrub grasses or the fibrous highland kressa or the vest’ul will grow here.

Straightening from his crouch, he thinks about Nekot’s words earlier. He thinks about how long he can hide under thorns until everything he has left chokes, bereft of sunlight and clogged in dust.

“But we’ll try anyways,” he says. “Come on, let’s get some lunch before we finish the other half.”

“Will you sing what you were singing before?” she asks, catching his hand with hers.

His boast a few scrapes and scratches, while hers are unscathed.

“Sure, _lis’sea_.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I love the headcanons where Iloja was exiled for being too horny, however I love the Memory Beta stuff on him that said he was a theoretical physicist and astronomer. Please check out GoodbyeBlueMonday's gorgeous Tobin/Iloja fic [A Roadmap To You](https://archiveofourown.org/works/26130076/chapters/63567856). It's wonderful. 
> 
> Julian loves mid-20th century jazz and Nina Simone.
> 
> From tinsnip and vyc's [kardasi dictionary](https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B2wcj3iYdWofb3Q5WHU1Y3Q3dzA/view):  
>  _bet’to_ \- a vegetable  
>  _preThok_ \- eagle  
>  _vest’ul_ \- literally, "dry knife", my invention as a colloquial name for a thorny shrub that grows in the Indar hills.
> 
> from [AlphaCygni](https://archiveofourown.org/users/AlphaCygni/pseuds/AlphaCygni)  
>  _lis’sea_ \- a term of endearment for a small child (honestly I've never seen a direct translation for this, so I always imagine it as 'little one')


	7. five months earlier

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> two jilted exes have a conversation

_five months earlier_

> _Garak —_
> 
> _Ezri is back from the Gamma Quadrant and wants to patch into your channel to talk. Let me know your availability. Starfleet and the Federation declared Julian missing at my insistence. They tell me there’s no confirmation of where he went after he landed in at the Jupiter Starport. His landing confirmation in London was forged. There were twenty-two ships that docked and took off in the two days after his landing at the Starport. Fifteen Federation ships, three Federation freighters, two Romulan warbirds escorting a diplomatic convoy, and the rest were shuttles to the Terran system outposts. Julian’s parents called me a few days ago and were very distraught. I wish I knew what to tell them._
> 
> _— Kira_
> 
> _P.S. Thanks for the advice. I’m going to call T’Val and hope what Ambassador Troi did can be forgotten._
> 
> _Kira —_
> 
> _I am sorry to hear about Dr. Bashir’s parents. I hope yet for answers. To this end, running the computer long enough for a properly encrypted search is difficult on the generator. Can you send me the crew manifestos of the ships in question? I should have enough power after 2300 station time to speak to Miss Ezri. Thanks._
> 
> _— Garak_
> 
> _P.S. The fabric has gone to good use. See attached image of the Paldar orphanage._

* * *

“No, the building permit for the solar array _clearly_ specifies electrostatic non-reflective cells. I know it’s more expensive and will delay the building project, Citizen Radak,” Garak says, as if Radak’s trying to buy a tunic in entirely the wrong color for her. “Do you know what will happen when dust sticks to those transparent aluminum panels? Oh, blasted…give me a second.”

Garak navigates through the maze of building permits and construction approvals for Coranum. Ah, there. The Botanical Garden project, lead by old Langor.

“Radak, send them over to Citizen Langor on the garden project,” says Garak. “I’ll fast track your approval when you get the _proper_ materials.”

On the comm, Radak sighs and has no choice but to thank him. Garak smiles.

“Putting out another fire?” says Kelas, only knocking on the door after he’s opened it.

Garak swears. “I’m late, aren’t I? How unseemly.”

“It’s a nice reversal,” he replies, adjusting the half-moon spectacles sliding down his nose. “A quiet day for the central hospital — at least in my office. I can’t say anything for the emergency ward.”

“Hm,” says Garak, locking his computer terminal. “The usual place?”

Kelas nods, not quite meeting Garak’s eye, and they fall into step together down the hall of the Central State Archives building.

There’s a public replimat in what was once the garden courtyard of the Judiciary. It’s a quick walk in the blazing equatorial heat of Cardassi’or, and him and Kelas chat idly about the new family moved into a new house beside Kelas’ apartment in the converted barracks of Akleen district. Easy, idle conversation.

They swipe their ration cards at the set of mobile replicator stalls and pick up their ration packs, the settle under the dappled shade of a pergola. The old scrap metal and piles of rubble once used as tables and chairs are now proper tables and chairs, thanks to the very delayed but welcome delivery of a series of industrial replicators and the solar cells to run them. _And a nice, hot summer too._

The months after the bombing of Lakat had been the some of the coldest and the harshest. Ash and dust choking the atmosphere. Acid rain, followed by cold drought. The pergola still has the faint oxidation pattern of raindrops etched into it. Now, Garak can eat at a table, pleasantly warm, even if lunch is limited to simple rations.

“Is the gossip about your promotion true?” Garak asks.

“You, of all people, should know that,” says Kelas.

He does.

“I am simply making conversation.”

“Conversation of my impending doom,” Kelas says. “I’m to be officially introduced to the medical aid liaisons in a few days.”

“Federation?” Garak confirms.

“Federation, Bajoran, Romulan, NERV-C,” he recounts. “I believe part of my promotion was a suggestion that Dr. Lejat’s lack of success was due to her charming demeanor.”

Garak chuckles. “She was rather delightful, wasn’t she?”

“Lieutenant Cole didn’t seem to think so,” says Kelas.

“Lieutenant Cole has an under-developed sense of humor,” Garak replies. Kelas hums in agreement.

“I will miss the sight of him trembling in his little uniform and dress shoes.”

“I wish he didn’t sweat so much. The smell...”

They chuckle.

“Such awful people we are,” Kelas muses. “Mr. Cole tries his best. You cannot blame him for not being your Dr. Bashir.”

Garak doesn’t say _I can,_ but Kelas hears it anyways.

On their way back to the Central Archives, having finished their meager rations, the silence of the street hits Garak. People move about on foot and on the occasional delivery skimmer, the sound like a murmur. Garak had grown accustomed to it without recognizing _what_ exactly he’d grown accustomed to. Or rather, accustomed to an absence. The children.

It’s quiet.

The city center has no dirty, unwashed orphans, no shrieks of laughter, no one bolting past to chase balls or to accidentally bump him only to find something missing from his person.

It’s quiet.

He would let them trample the flowers, break the windows with their ten’kat balls, disturb him with shrieks of laughter if it meant they’d come back.

_Come back,_ he begs the deaf, indifferent, universe, and a low, velvety drawl murmurs back, _keep hoping._

_Why don’t_ you _come back?_ Garak thinks. Absence. Quiet. Hope is all he had left. He’ll hold on to Julian’s hope as long as he lives. Not mere optimism — the naive fancy of youth that things would turn out alright in the end, but a monstrous affliction.

What a terrible, frightening thing it is to carry a deep conviction that there’s good in the world and one must fight for it.

Easy to let die, difficult to kill.

When he returns to his office, Kira has replied to his message with the list of vessels, but he has fifteen permits to review and another seven messages from his Paldar constituents with various complaints and demands. Shrapnel that needs clearing from the main road, a corroded pipe under public jurisdiction, someone irritated that their neighbor’s laundry line is blocking their view of the mountains.

* * *

At home in his slightly expanded shed, Garak sloughs off the day’s dust under a quick sonic shower and eats his evening ration. The sunlight dies slowly, then all at once.

Waiting for Commander Dax’s comm, Garak busies himself with sewing another caftan and jacket for the children down the street. The scent of his shop’s storeroom clings to the soft wool, both unpleasantly stale — voles, dust, poorly recycled air — and deeply comforting. Proof he didn’t conjure up his decade of exile and sharp, painful pangs of bliss of moments spent with Dr. Julian Bashir. And with every stitch, powered by the foot-pedal to conserve precious solar power, he thinks in the same loop he’s been thinking in since he left Deep Space Nine.

The three days before Julian stepped on a transport to Earth hum through his mind with the rhythmic whir of the foot pedal and the tap tap tap of the foot of the needle plate through fabric.

Stardate 55621 _._ A Tarkalean tea, extra sweet, ordered from the replicator at 1800 hours. Perfectly punctual routine, no deviation (except for when he took his bi-monthly night shift, in which case he ordered a raktajino). Dinner at 0800 hours. A couscous. He ordered it every six days or so.

According to Quark, who became a wellspring of information upon finding Garak waiting for him in his quarters, Julian frequented Quark’s around 2100 hours three or four nights of the station week. If he ordered a gin and tonic, it was a good sign he’d be at the bar for another hour, talking to some handsome crew member off a passing freighter or visiting convoy. If he ordered a synthale he usually shared it with some of the new senior staff for forty-five minutes, before moving on to his tonic and then finding someone to pick up at the bar. Mostly men, apparently. Once a week or so, him and Kira drank in companionable silence or a low chatter about crew, the diplomatic convoys, springball or Bajoran politics. Those nights he didn’t leave with anyone.

That evening Julian spent at Vic’s. Alone. Another weekly occurrence.

Upon questioning, the lounge singer had said, “He’d requested ‘Night and Day,’ you know, Cole Porter. Not too unusual, but it was the first time he’d asked for it in a while.”

And Vic had sung a few lines at Garak’s professed lack on knowledge of Earth jazz.

_Day and night_

_Why is it so_

_That this longing for you follows wherever I go_

_In the roaring traffic's boom_

_In the silence of my lonely room_

_I think of you night and day_

Garak pretended the music didn’t touch him.

“There was one thing that was a little strange,” said Vic. “After the song, he said, ‘it’s been six months and I never got an answer.’”

As far as Garak knew, Julian had done nothing out of the ordinary the following day. Day shift, dinner, Quark’s. He’d gone somewhere with some visiting engineer off a Federation vessel, then returned to his quarters at 2600 hours.

There, the story changed. An hour after entering his quarters, Julian had ordered a medical kit with his override authorization. The next morning at 0600 hours, he’d sent a leave request to Kira, approved at 0800 hours. He skipped breakfast with Kira, pulled a double shift in the infirmary, and that night, went to Quark’s.

Around 2100 hours, Kira had found him craving a glass of _civit_ and angling for an answer on who Quark thought was the love of his life. He’d returned to his quarters at 2300 after spending a bit of time staring out the observation window on the upper Promenade, and recorded the messages for Kira, O’Brien, and presumably Starfleet. He’d taken a 0800 shuttle for Earth. A civilian transport with a Vulcan captain and traveled the six days to Jupiter Starport. Never seen again.

There was once comfort in replaying Julian’s routine in his head alongside Garak’s own. Breakfast of tea and scones with moba jam, work in the clinic, lunch, work in the clinic and research, dinner, Quarks or an evening in.

Now, not knowing where Julian is and having no frame of reference, his mind invents tortuous scenarios. Ones in which Julian wakes to the red light of the Cardassian sun, ones where Julian stirs under the weight of Garak’s arm flung over the man’s warm waist, ones where Garak presses a whole symphony of kisses to the line of heady, musky brown skin running from Julian’s neck to shoulder.

It is so fanciful, really? A part of Julian lives here. A part of Julian will always live here. Lives because Garak lives. Lives in every stitch on Ekara’s new caftan, even as she dirties it under the window diving for an piece of scrap metal crushed into a ball. Lives in the pots of orchids sending out new buds he hopes will turn to blooms of white and red. Lives because love has to go somewhere, because it can’t help but go somewhere, and because now that he sees Cardassia slowly coming back to life, he finds love spilling out of him like wound that won’t heal.

But he never runs out of blood. Even on the rare days when he bleeds enough to grow cold and faint and delirious, chasing sleep with a glass of old kanar, he wakes up in the morning, still alive, still stained, still raw, still open.

The comm chimes. Ah, fun. Time to be reminded again of how Julian chose to shower his attention on someone else. He replicates a cup of tea. It’ll dwindle his power credit as much as taking the comm, but he needs it for the conversation at hand.

Ezri Dax’s pale, heart-shaped face flickers into view. Her hair is long enough to tuck behind her chin.

“Commander Dax, my congratulations,” Garak says.

“Thank you,” Ezri says, polite. “Congratulations to you on the election. A democratic Cardassia is exciting.”

“It could stand to be less exciting and more easily accepted, but thank you,” he replies.

“You seem happier than you were when you were tailoring,” Ezri says.

Garak holds up the cloth in his lap.

“Still tailoring, Commander,” he corrects.

Her mouth slants in a smile.

“I guess it’s Cardassia then. You’re no longer on a cold station,” she says.

“Amazing what not being in exile betraying your people to try to save them can do for your mood,” he says. “Now, you didn’t call me just to catch up on my mental health. I’m hardly a priority communique for someone who has been in the Gamma Quadrant for a year, far out of range of a proper face-to-face comm.”

“Kira told me you’re investigating where Julian went,” she says.

“As much as I can while performing my duties as a Councillor,” says Garak. “The building committees keep me busy. Who knew coordinating the installation of solar arrays across a whole continent could be so convoluted?”

Ezri tilts her head a little.

“Do you have any leads?”

“He did a good job covering his tracks, unfortunately,” Garak replies. “Was rather hoping you could help me.”

“Me?” Ezri says.

“I was hoping on some insight on Dr. Bashir while you were still on the station. About why he stayed or what might have prompted him to leave.”

“I’m shocked anything prompted him to leave. He was stuck.”

“What makes you think he was stuck?” Garak asks.

Ezri sighs.

“When Kira let me spend time in Ops to see if I wanted to commit to command, I got temporary clearance to see postings and orders and transfers. Before I left, Julian had received five transfer offers to postings both more lucrative career-wise and more suited to his desire for action. Deep Space Nine is _boring._ An exciting day for him was someone hitting their head on a bulkhead while coming home drunk from Quark’s or delivering a baby. He turned down every offer.”

“Did you ever ask him about it?”

“We talked about him transferring when I was discussing taking a command track. He somehow deferred the question completely. I didn’t even realize he never gave me and answer until a day later.”

A smile twitches over his face.

“I’m sorry to hear the tricks I used on Doctor Bashir were repurposed for you.”

“It’s not your fault. You should be flattered he learned so much from you,” she says. The bitterness is unmistakable. _It’s your fault,_ she says, unspeaking. “If he loved me it wasn’t what love was supposed to be.”

“And so it ended.”

“And so it ended.”

“How?” Garak asks.

“It died,” she says. “It died a slow and sad kind of death. Really, I think we never should have been together. Relationships in the first year of joining are often doomed and I’m much happier where I am now. I’m different. After I left, though, we were able to be friends again. We talked on the comms. I guess I thought I was important enough to be told he was _resigning_ Starfleet.”

“That’s interesting to hear, because Colonel Kira told me of a rather interesting conversation she had at Quark’s with Julian the night before he left for Earth,” says Garak. “Apparently he asked Quark who he thought Dr. Bashir loved more than anyone else. Quark seemed to think it was you, Dax, and Dr. Bashir was very pleased at that answer.”

Ezri bursts into a full-bellied, head thrown back laugh. She laughs and laughs and laughs.

“Oh,” she sighs, chuckling, fanning her face. “Oh, that’s good.”

“Care to let me in on the joke?”

“If he loved me he had a very funny way of showing it. I left him, but it was to do us both a favor. I knew he had fallen out of love with me. He spent all his time on research. He slowly got bored of talking about literature with me. He sabotaged every chance to grow our relationship.”

Garak hums in reluctant sympathy.

“Dr. Bashir’s attention can be a bright light, and it’s absence a long shadow,” he says.

Ezri sighs.

“I never had all of him. There was a part of him I would never see, would never be trusted with. And…” She frowns, looking down and swallowing a lump in her throat. “You know, I have three hundred years worth of memories, Garak, but you don’t need that to tell when you’re in bed with someone that they’re wishing you were someone else.”

Garak shifts the unfinished caftan in his lap, twining and untwining his hands in the fabric.

For what it’s worth,” says Garak. “I believe he enjoyed your company independently of your connection to Jadzia.”

“Jadzia?” Ezri scoffs, jaw twitching in anger. “You think…”

She shakes her head.

“Quark seems to think so, and he has a finger on the pulse of such things,” Garak says, bitter.

“Quark is a gossip. And even knowing Julian as long as I have, he’s still an enigma. I wonder if I never understood him.”

Garak wants to say _of course. None of you understood him._ The need to collect accolades at war with the need to temper himself, the need to dissent at war with duty, the need to find a home, a permanence, at war with the need for transience, tenderness at war with steel. Of course they couldn’t understand him. Julian Bashir lived in these marvelous contradictions. He wore them sincerely.

Maybe, in the end, Julian had been consumed by the push and pull, careening off balance. Maybe someone had pushed him over the edge.

_“You_ knew him better than any of us.”

“Not anymore, I’m afraid,” Garak sighs. “I haven’t so much as received a comm from the good doctor since I left Deep Space 9 more than three years ago.”

“ _What?_ ”

Ezri’s shock shocks him.

“But he wrote to you _all the time._ He never talked about it, but I saw one of his datapadds one day and there was letter after letter…”

Oh, by the gods, it guts him. If it’s true, it means Julian had been trying. Trying to tell him something, anything. Should he have sent a comm himself? Sent a message? But he knows better than to regret his decision. If he asked Julian to come to Cardassia, he wouldn’t have been content to be a three-month assignment of Julian’s. If he asked Julian to come, he would have had to ask him to stay.

He reels in his feelings.

“You must be mistaken, Commander. I never received a single communication from Doctor Bashir.”

“What?”

“I can only imagine he didn’t remember me enough to say goodbye,” says Garak. It won’t do to be excessively bitter.

An odd look comes over Dax’s new face.

“Garak, he isn’t capable of saying goodbye to you,” she says.

“My dear, whatever do you mean by that?”

She scoffs.

“You have to know,” she says. “Surely, you know?”

“I am but a small chapter in Julian Bashir’s book, Commander. Closed. Forgotten,” says Garak.

_But maybe not so forgotten,_ a hopeful little voice prods, _if he was trying to tell you something._ Julian was probably just getting the guts to say goodbye formally.

At this, Ezri drops her face in her hands and laughs, mirthless and a little desperate. She rests her chin on her hands, frowning to the side of the screen. By the way the light hits her face, soft and bright, she’s gazing out a window resplendent with mid-day sun.

“You know what I thought when I heard Julian slipped away and resigned?”

Garak lets the silence stretch, knowing she’ll supply her own answer.

“I thought, that smug, charming little prick finally got up the nerve to take a shuttle to Cardassia. I thought, finally, he’s going to show up at your doorstep and make a ridiculous fool out of himself, asking to volunteer on some med-team _convinced_ he can single-handedly save a whole planet if he tries hard enough,” Ezri says.

He doesn’t have to deliberately stretch the silence now. Any words he conjures up vanish in a puff of stellar dust. He’s missing some sort of gravity. He can’t glue anything together.

The indomitable Dax charges on, “Julian didn’t _forget_ you. Oh, I think he tried. I think he tried so hard he nearly self-destructed. You did what the rest of us couldn’t. You kept his interest.”

Could it be possible? Possible that he had not misinterpreted Julian’s feelings all those years ago? If so, he should be touched that whatever Julian once felt for Garak is precious enough to need concealing. It’s so delightfully, poignantly Cardassian; a romantic action worthy of the Never-Ending Sacrifice.

But once again, Garak is just a weakness someone couldn’t afford.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> the girls are figggghhhhttttinggg. thank you all for your patience for a late update! i had a bunch of revisions for my manuscript for my real (scientific) job. 
> 
> next up, julian's friends accommodate his new adopted daughter.


End file.
